The highest resolution images of Pluto ever captured have been released by NASA. The images have been taken by the New Horizons probe in its flyby of the dwarf planet in July. The most detailed color map of the dwarf planet is seen in the images.

According to William McKinnon, New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team deputy lead from Washington University in St. Louis, "It's a unique and perplexing landscape stretching over hundreds of miles. It looks more like tree bark or dragon scales than geology. This'll really take time to figure out; maybe it's some combination of internal tectonic forces and ice sublimation driven by Pluto's faint sunlight".

One can zoom into different locations on the cylindrical projection map to look closely at diverse and mystifying landscapes of Pluto. According to the New Horizons team, a recently found patch of intriguingly ruffled ridges similar to snakeskin is among them.

McKinnon said that it’s not clear what types of natural forces led to these strange reptilian formations and it will take time to understand. He said so assuming that possibly it is a combination of ice sublimation due to Pluto’s faint sunlight and internal tectonic forces.

Besides revealing previously hidden features of surface of the dwarf planet, the new images showed higher resolution images of the regions that have already been found.

These regions include the dunes of the region called Sputnik Planum that is on the western side of the popular heart-shaped Tombaugh Regio. The region could be seen in the images in beautiful detail.At present, the spacecraft is moving into the Kuiper belt at high speed.

"We used MVIC's infrared channel to extend our spectral view of Pluto," said John Spencer, a GGI deputy lead from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. "Pluto's surface colors were enhanced in this view to reveal subtle details in a rainbow of pale blues, yellows, oranges, and deep reds. Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a wonderfully complex geological and climatological story that we have only just begun to decode."

"It's like the classic chicken-or-egg problem," said Will Grundy, New Horizons surface composition team lead from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. "We're unsure why this is so, but the cool thing is that New Horizons has the ability to make exquisite compositional maps across the surface of Pluto, and that'll be crucial to resolving how enigmatic Pluto works."

"With these just-downlinked images and maps, we've turned a new page in the study of Pluto beginning to reveal the planet at high resolution in both color and composition," added New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of SwRI. "I wish Pluto's discoverer Clyde Tombaugh had lived to see this day."