Anticipating New Horizons
This artist’s rendition of Pluto from early 2015 sees the dwarf planet as quite pitted, with Charon flanking the planet on the left. Before New Horizons reached its target, scientists had to rely on educated guesses as to Pluto’s structure and makeup, which were turned into illustrations like the one above. While these illustrations capture the imagination, if there’s one thing they’re missing, it’s the amount of detail and variation that Pluto’s actual surface contains. New Horizons images revealed great geological diversity: plains pockmarked by craters, rippled terrain that looks like sand dunes, endless fields of frozen nitrogen, and snowcapped mountains.
