Snapped by LORRI on the morning of July 9 and received by the mission control on July 10, the new images of Pluto show a great deal of the dwarf planet’s geology including an vast dark band known as the “whale.” NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will fly by at its closest distance to Pluto at approximately 7:49 a.m., July 14, 2015. There is also a scientifically interesting region where bright areas join dark areas of the “whale”.
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Pluto as seen from 3.3 million miles away – image has not been colorized.
NASA’s probe is the first spacecraft to explore the ninth planet, arriving this month at a range close enough to reveal the most detailed shots yet of the icy rock in the Kuiper Belt.
The black and white image captured the side of Pluto that always faces its largest moon called Charon. The three billion mile journey has taken nine years, on a budget of $720 million. On Tuesday, it will make its closest approach with the dwarf planet, when the probe passes about 7,750 miles from the surface of the world.
According to New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern from the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, these two planetary objects have been sharing the same orbit for billions of years yet they are totally different from each other.
Next week, New Horizons will be within 6,000 miles of Pluto and it’s expected to capture stellar images of it.
As New Horizons gets closer to Pluto, the pictures are getting better.
The image shows Pluto to the left, with the mysterious dark spots lined up along the equator.
As the latest image from the New Horizons spacecraft appeared on Friday, scientists are just starting to see Pluto’ s geology. “We are going about 30,000 miles per hour through the Pluto system and if we hit even a rice-grain-sized particle, it could blow a hole through the spacecraft and potentially destroy the mission”, Weaver said.
“NASA annotation highlights features growing increasingly visible on Pluto’s surface”. Additional discoveries of the mission hope to include learning more about the Plutonian atmosphere and composition, as well as the composition of its first discovered moon, Charon (1978).
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Scientists and researchers involved in the New Horizons mission aren’t completely positive about what the space probe will find on Pluto. (The New Horizons team has narrowed the possible targets down to two finalists, both of which are much smaller than Pluto.).
