Pluto looks beautiful from above.
A new video -- compiled using actual photos collected by the New Horizons spacecraft during its close flyby of the dwarf planet in July -- takes you on a ride above the tiny world's heart-shaped plains and icy Norgay Montes, named for Tenzing Norgay, who scaled Mount Everest with Edmund Hillary.
"Our tour starts low over the informally named Norgay Montes at a height of about 120 miles (200 kilometers). These jagged mountains rise almost 2 miles (3 kilometers) from the surrounding surface," New Horizons scientist Stuart Robbins said in a NASA blog post about the video.
"We head north over Sputnik Planum (bright area to the left) and Cthulhu Regio (dark area to the right). While Sputnik Planum is smooth at this pixel scale, it’s in marked contrast to Cthulhu Regio which has many large impact craters that indicate the Regio is much older."
These new images of Pluto were beamed back to Earth by September 11, and the video is a good companion to NASA's earlier flyover video showing New Horizons' view of what it was like to fly past Pluto during the close flyby on July 14.
New Horizons entered the history books when it became the first spacecraft to ever make a close-pass with the dwarf planet.
Pluto is located in a part of space known as the Kuiper Belt, a mass of cold bodies that orbit the sun from the outer solar system. Scientists think that learning more about Pluto and its fellow dwarf planets could be a way to actually learn more about how the solar system and other planets formed.
The objects in the Kuiper Belt likely represent the leftovers of the dawn of the solar system billions of years ago, so the more data researchers collect on those icy worlds, the more we might learn about how planets came together in our cosmic neighborhood.