Interactive globe of Pluto, built from the New Horizons 300 m/px global mosaic and the stereo digital elevation model. All 73 IAU-approved surface names are selectable: Sputnik Planitia and its convecting nitrogen ice sheet, the candidate cryovolcanic edifices Wright and Piccard Montes, the bladed terrain of Tartarus Dorsa, and the dark equatorial belt approved in 2023 as Belton Regio. Coverage is that of a single flyby: the mosaic spans ~78% of the body, the terrain south of ~38°S received no direct sunlight, and topography is defined only over the stereo footprint.
One paper is pinned as the anchor for the current state of the Pluto literature. Its claims are graded and its open questions listed; a live feed tracks subsequent citations.
The result is decomposed into its constituent statements, each carrying the grade assigned under the Worlds representation contract.
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Questions the anchor paper leaves unresolved.
The sphere is rendered in Three.js at Pluto's mean radius, 1188.3 km, scaled to scene units. The base map is the New Horizons LORRI/MVIC global mosaic at 300 m/px, the cartographic product of the July 2015 flyby. The mosaic is panchromatic; a single uniform tint at Pluto's mean colour is applied, so all structure in the rendered brightness originates in the data. Relief is vertex displacement driven by the stereo global DEM of Schenk et al. (2018). The −4.1 to +6.5 km range corresponds to ~0.9% of the radius, about twice the equivalent figure for Mercury. With relief disabled the DEM is applied as a bump map; an Elevation overlay renders the same field as a hypsometric choropleth. Textures are loaded from Maps/textures/pluto_color_*.jpg and Data/worlds/pluto/layers/.
The mosaic spans ~78% of the body: the encounter hemisphere at full resolution and the anti-encounter hemisphere at approach resolution. Terrain south of ~38°S lay beyond the terminator at encounter and is rendered black; imagery of part of that region exists only in scattered haze-light and is not carried in this product. The stereo DEM covers ~42% of the body, and terrain outside that footprint is held at the 0-km datum rather than interpolated. The seam between high-resolution and approach imagery is left unretouched.
The entries in Data/worlds/pluto/features.json are the complete set of 73 IAU-approved names in the USGS Gazetteer as retrieved in June 2026: nitrogen plains, water-ice montes, candidate cryovolcanic edifices, fossae, the bladed terrain, and six lineae named for lunar missions. Named features carry either a geological summary or the official origin of the name. The dark equatorial belt formerly designated Cthulhu informally was approved as Belton Regio on 22 September 2023. The research panel queries body_server.py at /api/pluto/latest, with a per-feature endpoint; absent a server, the seed research.json and ADS search links are used. The engine, server and data schema are shared with the other Worlds globes.
Both USGS products are published on a 180° centre meridian and are rolled half a width during texture preparation, placing the map centre at 0° with a left edge of −180°. Longitudes are IAU east-positive about the right-hand-rule pole, which for Pluto lies at ecliptic latitude −22.8°; the idle rotation is therefore rendered retrograde with respect to the orbit, at one rotation per 6.3872 Earth days. Sputnik Planitia (19.5°N, 178.7°E, straddling the map seam, with the centre of Tombaugh Regio at 183.2°E) and Burney (45.7°N, 133.8°E) are used as registration checks.
Pluto is marked in cyan on a live map of the uniquely named bodies of the solar system — planets, dwarf planets, and approximately 26,000 named minor planets and comets out to the Kuiper belt — together with the interstellar objects and the escaping spacecraft. Positions are evaluated at load time and each body links to its source record.
body_server.py