The Badlands of Pluto

This close-up view of Pluto's badlands shows the edge of the planet's incredible heart-shaped plain aka the Tombaugh Regio. Image Source: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI.

On 10 December 2015, NASA released high resolution photographs of the Plutonian landscape from the New Horizons July flyby. Above:

The images form a strip 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide, trending (top to bottom) from the edge of “badlands” northwest of the informally named Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi mountains, onto the shoreline of Pluto’s “heart” feature, and just into its icy plains. They combine pictures from the telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) taken approximately 15 minutes before New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, with – from a range of only 10,000 miles (17,000 kilometers) ... .

Below, a photograph of cratered terrain, released on 16 September 2015:

This 220-mile (350-kilometer) wide view of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft illustrates the incredible diversity of surface reflectivities and geological landforms on the dwarf planet. The image includes dark, ancient heavily cratered terrain; bright, smooth geologically young terrain; assembled masses of mountains; and an enigmatic field of dark, aligned ridges that resemble dunes; its origin is under debate. The smallest visible features are 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers) in size. This image was taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers).

Cratered terrain, photographed on 14 July 2015 and released 16 September 2015. Image Source: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.

And finally, from 24 September 2015, a view of the Tartarus Dorsa Mountains:

In this extended color image of Pluto taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, rounded and bizarrely textured mountains, informally named the Tartarus Dorsa, rise up along Pluto’s day-night terminator and show intricate but puzzling patterns of blue-gray ridges and reddish material in between. This view, roughly 330 miles (530 kilometers) across, combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) on July 14, 2015, and resolves details and colors on scales as small as 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers).

The Tartarus Dorsa Mountains. Image Source: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI.