New Horizons already has sent historic images of the former planet itself and its nearby moon Charon, and the recently demoted ex-planet has not disappointed.
There do not appear to be any homegrown creatures, but Pluto has turned out to be younger than expected with still-active seismology that cannot yet be explained.
The newest photographs are of Nix, the third of Pluto’s five known moons.
Charon was discovered in 1978 but the smaller moons — Styx, Nix, Hydra and Kerberos — were discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2005.
“These are the early days of a close encounter analysis,” said Jeff Moore, who leads NASA’s New Horizons team at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California.
“We are in the most preliminary stages of our investigations,” he said, according to SkyNews.com.
The New Horizons spacecraft, about the size of a piano, came within 300,000 miles of Pluto on Tuesday, the closest humans had ever come to what had been regarded as the solar system’s ninth planet.
Pluto was demoted — controversially — to dwarf planet in 2006.
But the latest photos taken by New Horizons reveal a celestial body larger than expected but still within the Kuiper Belt, a factor that disqualified it from being a recognized planet.
The new photos show Pluto’s surface to be relatively free of impact craters, a finding that probably reveals that it is still biologically active — a surprise for a body so far from its sun and located in a crowded portion of space.
The surface is made up of frozen carbon monoxide, methane and nitrogen.
“The terrain is not easy to explain,” Moore said.
“We are still entertaining the widest range of hypotheses.”
Among those theories are that Pluto has a molten core, although no one knows of what.
But the New Horizons craft won’t be waiting around to find out.
The ship, which took nearly 10 years to travel the 3 billion miles to reach Pluto, is has already moving away from the dwarf planet and further into the Kuiper Belt.
