New Horizons scientists made this false-color image of Pluto using a technique called principal component analysis to highlight the many subtle color differences between Pluto's distinct regions. The image data were collected by the spacecraft’s Ralph/MVIC color camera on July 14 at 11:11 AM UTC, from a range of 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers). (Credits:NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

The latest photo dump from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft — which made humanity's to the dwarf planet in July — has wowed scientists with its detailed images.

New Horizons captured a robust terrain, including craggy mountains, wide, flat plains and icy glaciers. There's also a haze, which sunlight strikingly illuminates in the lead photo in the slideshow above.

This haze, along with other recently revealed features, hints at a “remarkably Earth-like 'hydrological' cycle on Pluto – but involving soft and exotic ices, including nitrogen, rather than water ice,” NAZA along with the five new images. “Pluto is surprisingly Earth-like in this regard,” New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado, said, “and no one predicted it.”

Earlier this month, NASA began its intensive download of New Horizons' data, collected during a quick flyby in July. The spacecraft was designed to capture and store as much information as possible, with transmissions to Earth delayed, meaning many more images are on the way.

“This is what we came for — these images, spectra and other data types that are going to help us understand the origin and the evolution of the Pluto system for the first time,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, earlier this month. “And what’s coming is not just the remaining 95 percent of the data that’s still aboard the spacecraft – it’s the best datasets, the highest-resolution images and spectra, the most important atmospheric datasets, and more. It’s a treasure trove.”

See the latest images in the slideshow above.

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The ESO 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla observatory in Chile, during observations. (ESO/S. Brunier)