NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is the first probe sent to Pluto, and it’s scheduled to arrive in July 2015. During the 30-minute flyby, New Horizons will take photographs of Pluto and its primary moon Charon, take readings to determine what the space objects are made of, and scan Pluto’s atmosphere.
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Above those features in the image is a polar region that is intermediate in brightness. At this range, Pluto is beginning to reveal the first signs of discrete geologic features, NASA said in a statement.
“We’re close enough now that we’re just starting to see Pluto’s geology,” said New Horizons program scientist Curt Niebur, NASA Headquarters in Washington, who’s keenly interested in the grey area just above the whale’s “tail” feature. Scientists reacted with jubilation in the control room Friday morning when the most recent image came down, showing some never-before-seen surface features.
On Saturday, New Horizons experienced a shutdown of its radio communications with Earth for 81 minutes as it drew nearer toward the end of a nine-and-a-half-year journey to the unexplored regions of outer space.
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.
This NASA image of Pluto from New Horizons’ Long Range… And New Horizons’ observations leading up to its epic July 14 Pluto flyby have already shown that the dwarf planet’s surface is a complex blend of bright and dark features, including one marking that looks like a giant heart and another that mission team members have dubbed “the whale”. New Horizons should shed some light on everything we’ve ever wondered about the dwarf planet.
This is the same image of Pluto and Charon from July 8, 2015; color information obtained earlier in the mission from the Ralph instrument has been added.
Thanks to this mission, today Pluto is known better than ever and the scientific community has high hopes for what it will learn from the photos to be beamed back to Earth in the coming days.
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The left image shows, on the right side of the disk, a large bright area on the hemisphere of Pluto that will be seen in close-up by New Horizons on July 14. As of Monday, the spacecraft, as stated by NASA, was nearly six million miles away from Pluto’s surface.
