Here's the Highest Resolution Map of Pluto We'll Get from New Horizons

In the course of the event, the panel members responded to questions and shared stories about the mission's greatest accomplishments. Among them were the many, many high-resolution photographs taken by the spacecraft's Ralph and Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) cameras. In addition to providing detailing images of Pluto's surface features, they also allowed for the creation of the very first detailed map of Pluto.

Though Pluto is not officially designated as a planet anymore - ever since the XXVIth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union, where Pluto was designated as a "dwarf planet" - many members of the team still consider it to be the ninth planet of the Solar System. Because of this, New Horizons' historic flyby was of particular significance.

As Principle Investigator Alan Stern - from the Southwestern Research Institute (SwRI) - explained in an interview with Inverse, the first phase of humanity's investigation of the Solar System is now complete. “What we did was we provided the capstone to the initial exploration of the planets," he said. "All nine have been explored with New Horizons finishing that task.”

Other significant discoveries made by the New Horizons mission include Pluto's famous heart-shaped terrain - aka.  Sputnik Planum. This region turned out to be a young, icy plain that contains water ice flows adrift on a "sea" of frozen nitrogen. And then there was the discovery of the large mountain and possible cryovolcano located at the tip of the plain - named Tombaugh Regio, (in honor of Pluto's discovered, Clyde Tombaugh).

“That really blew away our expectations. We did not think that a planet the size of North America could be as complex as Mars or even Earth. It’s just tons of eye candy. This color map is the highest resolution we will see until another spacecraft goes back to Pluto.”

“That really blew away our expectations. We did not think that a planet the size of North America could be as complex as Mars or even Earth. It’s just tons of eye candy. This color map is the highest resolution we will see until another spacecraft goes back to Pluto.”