Captured just 15 minutes following the New Horizons Pluto flyby, this image captures the hazy atmospheric layers encompassing the dwarf planet. The sunlit side (right) reveals the texture of Pluto’s surface. Its mountainous regions reach nearly 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) high.
The New Horizons mission made its closest approach to Pluto on July 14th, 2015. The spacecraft’s next destination is deep in the Kuiper Belt, a region composed of various ices and dusts beyond the orbit of Neptune. New Horizons is scheduled to flyby 2014 MU69, a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) nearly 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) from Earth on January 1st, 2019.
Image Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI