Pluto: the world that's everything at once

Abstract

Aron and Sokol detail Pluto's surface which are baffling and amazing. The variation stunned researchers when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft beamed back the first close-ups of Pluto and its moons last week. The dwarf planet is unlike any other world they've ever visited. So is its largest moon, Charon. That surprise has turned even the most seasoned Pluto experts into wide-eyed surveyors, cataloguing the dwarf planet's many mismatched oddities and trying to find the joins. The maps from New Horizons, which will be downloaded and analyzed over the coming year, are already proving hard to interpret-and harder still to explain