"It is approximately 1,000 times better than we could do even with the biggest and baddest Hubble Space telescope at Earth," said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, at a NASA briefing on Tuesday.
Currently, scientists are not sure what is responsible for the light and dark regions that are now clearly visible on Pluto's surface, but they hope to answer that mystery within the coming months as
new data from New Horizons pours in.
"You can see regions of various kinds of brightness," Stern said. "What we know is that on the surface, there is the history of impacts, and we [also] see a history of surface activity." For example, there's evidence that it snows on Pluto!
The New Horizons spacecraft took 9 1/2 years to reach Pluto.
A 3 billion mile journey!
