Stunning close-up images show Pluto like we've never seen it before

NASA just released the best look at Pluto that we'll see from the New Horizons flyby in July.

The spacecraft captured these images just 10,000 miles away from Pluto, with a resolution of about 250 feet per pixel. That level of sharpness is enough to reveal "features less than half the size of a city block," according to NASA.

Now NASA has mapped color data onto the images (the color is from previous images taken at a lower resolution), to create a stunning, colored composite of a 50 mile strip of Pluto.

The first part of the image shows Pluto's patch of craters:

And farther south you can see Pluto's al-Idrisi mountain range bordering its smoother, heart-shaped plain called Sputnik Planum:

Here's a zoomed out look at the whole strip of Pluto that NASA imaged:

And you can see a close up of the whole image below. The craters are at the top of the image, Pluto's heavily scarred "badlands" region is in the middle, and the mountains and Sputnik Planum are at the bottom:

Scientists are surprised by how complex Pluto's geology is, and they'll continue to study the dwarf planet as the New Horizons spacecraft beams back more data.

NOW WATCH: This animation shows the complex features of Pluto, which rival anything we've seen in the solar system

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