Well, Pluto looks like a brain.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has just snapped another image of the dwarf planet, and, strangely some of Pluto's blurry formations give it an odd, wrinkly appearance. The photo shows the tiny red planet's south pole as a series of dark and light areas on July 3.
As New Horizons gets closer to its historic flyby with Pluto on July 14, those still blurry features should begin to resolve, revealing what the formations could be.
"This object is unlike any other that we have observed," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said during a news conference Monday.
The photos New Horizons is beaming back to Earth now are even better than images of Pluto taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, and the tiny craft hasn't even made its flyby yet.
While Pluto has some similarities to Neptune's largest moon Triton, "it is not a Triton," Stern said. "It [Pluto] looks like it has a much more complicated story to tell us."
The newly-released photo was taken just before New Horizons experienced a glitch that sent it into a "safe mode," which forced it to stop collecting scientific data on July 4.
July 4 "safe mode" won't harm mission, NASA says
The spacecraft is now back up and running, and it is working "flawlessly," Stern said. The probe should start collecting science data again on Tuesday.
Mission managers think the safe mode was caused by a unique combination of events that overworked the spacecraft's processor, leading to its shutdown in order to prevent it from crashing completely. Launched in 2006, the spacecraft features computer processing technology dating to the early-to-mid-2000s. However, mission managers say it is more than up to the task of providing unprecedented details about the mysterious dwarf planet.
The probe was only in its safe mode for a short amount of time, but mission controllers needed to quickly find the cause of the problem to make sure that the craft was prepared for the big Pluto flyby -- the major milestone of the mission -- in a little more than a week.
New Horizons lost about 30 observations because of the anomaly on July 4. All in all, however, the spacecraft is still on track to make close-up observations of Pluto during the probe's flyby in eight days, according to NASA.
The $700 million New Horizons mission launched on its 3 billion mile, 9.5-year journey to Pluto in 2006.
The craft is tasked with getting the first up-close views of the dwarf planet, its biggest moon Charon and its four small moons.