Pluto's evaporating ice leaves it with a blank face

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Today, the New Horizons spacecraft beamed back the first clear images of Pluto's surface – marking the start of a mission into the unknown, icy Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system. Pluto's got a blank face. It seems that the dwarf planet's nitrogen-rich ice evaporates faster than realized.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has returned the first new photographs of Pluto and the largest of its five moons, Charon. Until now, we've only been able to see the dwarf planet as a pinpoint of light - and guess what it might look like up close.
The images were taken from 126 million miles away with New Horizons' telescopic camera. The pictures have already been magnified FOUR times, but still look rather blurry.

However, the spacecraft is getting closer and closer to the Pluto system and will be getting some stunning close-ups in a flyby on July 14 this year. By that time, New Horizons will return the most vivid images of Pluto we've ever seen.
The images were released on the 109th birthday of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the icy world back in 1930.
"My dad would be thrilled," said his daughter Annette.
"To actually see the planet that he had discovered, and find out more about it - to get to see the moons of Pluto - he would have been astounded."

Her father identified Pluto after spotting a pinpoint of light in the telescopes at an observatory in Arizona.

Over the next few months, New Horizons - which has already covered more than 3 billion miles in its journey past Mars and Neptune - will take hundreds of pictures of Pluto as well as measuring dust, solar wind and space particles.

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