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ver since last summer’s Pluto flyby of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, two UVA scientists have been astounded by images streaming in from the edge of the solar system: breathtaking shots of Pluto and its moons, close-up views of icy mountains, glaciers of frozen nitrogen and the dwarf planet’s hazy, tenuous atmosphere.

UVA planetary astronomer Anne Verbiscer, and UVA planetary geologist Alan Howard were among the first scientists to witness and begin analyzing photos and data.

“We’re all in awe of what we’ve seen, as well as what can be accomplished when humanity pursues its fundamental desire to explore,” Verbiscer said. “What we now know that we didn’t know is that Pluto is an incredibly rich and diverse world that will keep us busy for years to come.”

Howard, called the experience “very emotional.”

“Pluto, we have found, is decorated with an amazing variety of landforms and frost features,” he said.

Verbiscer and Howard have selected a handful of images to share with Illimitable readers. In the coming years they will examine hundreds more, gaining new understanding of how planets form and evolve, and, by implication, how geological processes on Earth made conditions favorable for life.

(All images are courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.)

(Image in video, above) New Horizons captured this high-resolution, enhanced-color view of Pluto on July 14, combining blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera. Pluto’s surface sports a remarkable range of subtle colors, enhanced in this view to a rainbow of pale blues, yellows, oranges and deep reds. Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a complex geological and climatological story that scientists have only just begun to decode.

Anne Verbiscer: “Here we see Pluto in all its glory, as New Horizons instantly transformed what had been only a point of light [a blurry smudge in Hubble Space Telescope images] since Pluto’s discovery in 1930 into a world we have explored.”

Alan Howard: “The color of planetary surfaces, in both our normal visible light range and in the infrared, can inform us about the materials on the surface. These colors have resulted in identification of water ice, nitrogen ices and methane ices on Pluto’s surface, among others.”