Nasa unveils stunning colour image of Pluto's surface

It's highly unlikely that anyone alive today will set foot on Pluto, so this high resolution colour image of the dwarf planet's surface is going to be the closest we get.

Last week Nasa released a mosaic of the "sharpest views" of Pluto that the New Horizons spacecraft captured on its flyby earlier this year. Now it has released a colour version.

The colour, in near-infrared, red and blue, was added to the original images after it was captured by the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera 25 minutes before New Horizon's passing of Pluto.

Each pixel in the images, which were taken on one of New Horizons' closest passings of the planet, is about 250-280 feet (77-85 meters) of the dwarf planet's surface.
"The images form a strip 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide trending from Pluto’s jagged horizon about 500 miles (800 kilometers) northwest of the informally named Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi mountains, onto the shoreline of Sputnik Planum and across its icy plains," the space agency said in a statement about the original image.
Nasa said the image reveals a "wide variety of  cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains" and comes as New Horizon's was just 10,000 miles from Pluto's surface.
The images are the latest published findings from the New Horizon mission which launched in 2006.