New Horizons captured a trove of images and data during the flyby, but it will take a year for it to send all that information across the solar system for scientists to study. In August, the spacecraft sent back data from two instruments measuring the dance of charged particles around Pluto and a student experiment that counted dust particles.

The scientists working with the charged particles data say they do not yet understand what they have found. “Because, as you might expect from a first flyby, they found really puzzling things,” Dr. Stern said. “They know they got good data, and they see signatures from the Pluto system, but they’re not anything like they predicted.”

Image A jumbled, chaotic terrain in the middle of this 300-mile-wide swath of Pluto lies to the left of icy plains known as Sputnik Planum. Credit... NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Last Friday, the mission team resumed the retrieval of images from New Horizons; it plans to release them weekly. Other photographs in this week’s batch show multiple haze layers in Pluto’s atmosphere, glacierlike flows of ice and what Dr. Stern described as “a very disorganized region hundreds of miles across where the mountains appear to be chaotically jumbled.”