New Horizons: Pluto map shows 'whale' of a feature
Scientists have released their latest map of Pluto, using images from the inbound New Horizons spacecraft.
It unwraps the visible parts of the sphere on to a flat projection, giving another view of the features that have started to emerge in recent days.
Evident are the light and dark patches at the equator, including one long dark band being dubbed "the whale".
The US space agency's (Nasa) New Horizons probe is now less than seven days away from its historic flyby.
It is due to pass over the surface of the dwarf planet at a distance of less than 13,000km, grabbing a mass of images and other kinds of scientific data.
The pictures at that point will be pin sharp, showing targets on the surface of the 2,300km-wide body at a resolution of better than 100m per pixel.
In the map on this page, the features are much less resolved. The images from which it was made were acquired between 27 June and 3 July.
They are a combination of shots from the probe's high-resolution, "black and white" camera, Lorri, and its lower-resolution, colour imager known as Ralph.
The whitish area in the centre covers the face of the dwarf planet that will present itself to New Horizons at closest approach.
To the east is the spotty terrain that has generated most discussion so far. Quite what these blobs represent is unclear. Each one is a few hundred km across.
Cradled in the whale's "tail", on the far left of the map, is something that looks like a doughnut. It could be a impact crater or a volcano, although at this resolution any interpretation remains pure speculation.
New Horizons has recovered from its weekend hiccup, in which the probe tripped itself into a protective safe mode and dropped communications with Earth for over an hour.
Engineers say they understand the cause of the computer glitch. This particular type of error, they stress, has now been ruled out for the probe's next few historic days.
The spots are part of a dark band that wraps around much