New enhanced color image takes you into the badlands of Pluto

Six months after NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto, we're still getting amazing images from the tiny probe. Today, NASA released a stunning enhanced color mosaic of Pluto's surface. The photo, which is the highest-resolution image taken by New Horizons, takes us into the "badlands" of northwest of Sputnik Planum — the icy planes that make up part of the famous "heart" on the dwarf planet.

The photo is a combination of images taken by the spacecraft's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) just 15 minutes before its closest approach to Pluto. At that point, New Horizons was just 10,000 miles away from the small world, able to capture these photos with resolutions of about 250-280 feet per pixel. The black-and-white version of the mosaic was released last week. To make this version, NASA scientists used color data gathered from the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera to map hues onto the image. Apparently, that isn't very easy.