HUBBLE PROVIDES LONG-SOUGHT PEEK AT REMOTE PLUTO.

Byline: Tony Knight Daily News Staff Writer

Since its discovery in 1930, Pluto has been seen as only a dim point of light - no better images were available of the icy dwarf planet 4 billion miles from Earth.

That changed Thursday when astronomers released blurry, computer-enhanced images of the solar system's most remote planet, based on photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The black-and-white images show a tiny sphere whose surface is mottled with dark and light patches.

"These images are just fabulous," said University of Washington astronomer Bruce Margon, who worked on the team using Hubble's Faint Object Camera to study Pluto.

"Pluto is 4 billion miles away," Margon said. "Now that the speed limit has been raised to 65 mph, you could drive there in 7,000 years."

The images, taken in late 1994, but not released until Thursday, show a northern polar ice cap, as well as the light and dark patches on the planet surface that scientists theorized are frozen nitrogen and methane snow.

The scientists were highly impressed with the mottled surface, saying that Pluto - just two-thirds the size of Earth's moon, and 12,000 times farther away - has yielded an image with more surface contrast than any other planetary body except Mars.

"Even in these raw images coming straight off the telescope we can see fantastic detail," said planetary scientist S. Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

The scientists acknowledged that the average person would have a hard time making out any detail from the hazy image. High resolution images of Pluto will have to await the flyby of a Jet Propulsion Laboratory spacecraft planned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration early in the next century.

Pluto is the only planet in our solar system not yet visited by a NASA spacecraft developed by Pasadena-based JPL.

In fact, JPL scientists giving talks to schoolchildren are used to getting a laugh by showing photographic images of the eight other planets, then saying, "And you all recognize Pluto" as an image of the Disney cartoon dog flashes on the screen.

Now the scientists will have a real image to show.

"The images give us a first uniform map of the surface of Pluto," said JPL astronomer Richard J. Terrile, who is working on the Pluto Express flyby mission. "This planet is beckoning to be explored."

But even Terrile couldn't resist one last quip, noting that the images still don't answer one burning question: "Why can Goofy talk and Pluto can't?"

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Photo Scientists believe photos of Pluto's mottled surface reveal an ice cap, frozen nitrogen and methane snow. Courtesy of NASA