Photos: Delta 4-Heavy launch gallery

An image released Thursday, taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft minutes after zipping past Pluto in July, shows the backlit world on a new scale, revealing rugged mountains, glacial plains and deep layers of atmospheric haze.

The first images from the New Horizons spacecraft since late July will come back to Earth on Sept. 5, and scientists are salivating over what the new pictures will reveal about Pluto.

Now just three weeks from its historic flyby of Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is close enough to detect objects smaller and dimmer than the dwarf planet’s smallest known moon and so far, nothing has been spotted that would pose a threat to the probe as it barrels through the system at more than 30,000 mph, scientists said Tuesday.