Pluto and Charon as never seen before

Images obtained during the New Horizons spacecraft’s July 14 encounter with Pluto show apparent glacial ice flows wrapping around barrier islands and towering mountain ranges, all under a haze layer suspended up to 100 miles above the distant world’s frozen surface.

Data from the encounter of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft with a frozen reddish snowman-shaped object a billion miles beyond Pluto last year suggest the building blocks of planets may have formed less violently than many scientists expected, officials said Thursday.

NASA managers formally approved the New Horizons mission another speedy encounter with an object at the frontier of the solar system, but denied a request from scientists to redirect the Dawn spacecraft to visit a third destination in the asteroid belt, opting to keep it in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, officials said Friday.