New Horizons is continuing on its path toward Pluto, falling through space at 31,000 miles an hour and giving viewers here on Earth increasingly detailed looks at features on the dwarf planet's surface. The space probe was still 3.3 million miles away when it captured this image, but mission members are already getting excited about the geology coming into focus.
A region known as the whale's tail is especially sharply defined in this latest photo. Both program scientist Curt Niebur and principal investigator Alan Stern expressed interest in the strong contrast between the darkness in the tail and the brighter grey area directly above it.
If you don't buy that these details are a big deal, just check out these faces in reaction to the snapshot as it came in (Stern is to the left):
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WIRED science writer Nick Stockton will be at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory next Tuesday when New Horizons makes its closest approach; follow him at @StocktonSays for updates and hopefully more reaction shots just like that.
