“It’s a unique transition region with a lot of dynamic processes interacting, which makes it of particular scientific interest”.
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New Horizons has been covering about 750,000 miles per day, more than three times the distance between the Earth and the Moon, leading up to the flyby of Pluto scheduled for July 14.
To its left lies an 1,860-mile-long (3,000-kilometer-long) dark patch along Pluto’s equator that mission scientists are calling ” the whale”.
It shows “the whale” at the bottom while the very bright region dubbed a “heart” has rotated out of view.
Since its launch in 2006, the New Horizon spacecraft has been snapping images of Pluto as it gets closer and closer to the planet. Now – in its latest portrait from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft – Pluto is being revealed as an intriguing new world with distinct surface features, including an immense dark band known as the “whale.”
Since Tombaugh discovered Pluto it has been of the most contentious bodies in the solar system with astronomers divided as to whether it is a planet, a dwarf-planet, an escaped moon of Neptune or even a comet.
“We’re at the “man in the moon” stage of viewing Pluto”, said John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado, deputy leader of the Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team.
Pluto has a significant atmosphere that gives it the reddish color seen in the photo below.
New Horizons’ seven instruments will study Pluto in more detail than any of the five moons, including Charon. And so is New Horizons, which will fulfill its destiny when it performs a flyby of Pluto on July 14th. The two have similarly cold climates, but while Pluto is believed to be covered by exotic ices comprised of frozen nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide, frozen water exists on Charon’s surface.
At last! After spending 9.5 years traveling 3 billion miles to reach Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has snapped an image of the dwarf planet that bears tantalizing hints of geologic features that will become clearer in the coming days. “Large craters can excavate material from several miles down and reveal the composition of the interior”.
In many ways this mission represents the end of humanity’s first era of solar system exploration.
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Fountain added that there is no chance a similar glitch will happen during the encounter period when the spacecraft will fly within 7,700 miles of Pluto.
