NASA just released the 1st clear photo ever taken of Pluto and its largest moon
Right now a piano-sized spacecraft is barreling through space at over 3o,000 mph with an important destination: the dwarf planet Pluto and its system of five moons.
On Wednesday, the NASA spacecraft, called New Horizons, was 3.7 million miles away from Pluto when it used its LORRI (LOng-Range Reconnaissance Imager) camera to snap the first clear photo of Pluto ever taken. Here it is, with Pluto's largest moon, Charon, on the left:
(NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI)
This latest image shows that we have come a long way since the days when the Hubble Space Telescope was taking images of Pluto that looked like this:
(Dr. R. Albrecht, ESA/ESO Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility; NASA)
Even with a powerful telescope like Hubble, Pluto is simply too small and far away to get a good, clear look at it from Earth.
That's why, in 2006, NASA launched New Horizons on its nine-year, 2.9-billion-mile journey to Pluto. Now the spacecraft has less than a few million miles left before its closest approach on Tuesday.
In this latest image, shown below in black and white, the spacecraft reveals two very different worlds: Pluto has distinctive contrasting dark and light colors on its surface, while Charon has a much smoother surface.
(NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI)
"These two objects have been together for billions of years, in the same orbit, but they are totally different," Alan Stern, the principal investigator of New Horizons, said in a NASA statement.
New Horizons' seven instruments will study Pluto in more detail than any of the five moons, including Charon. But simply from detailed images like this — and many more to come as New Horizons closes in on Pluto — scientists will still get a better understanding of Charon than they ever have before.
"If we see impact craters on Charon, it will help us see what's hidden beneath the surface," New Horizons team member Jeff Moore said in the NASA statement.
A closer look at Pluto, left, and Charon together shows just how different these two worlds are on their surface:
(NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI)
New Horizons is quickly closing in on Pluto, at speeds able to cover 1 million miles in just over 30 hours.
NASA has carefully calibrated the spacecraft to fly within 7,600 miles of Pluto on Tuesday. That's one-six-hundredth the distance it was Wednesday, when it snapped that clear photo at the top of this post.
From 7,600 miles, the sophisticated instruments on the spacecraft will be able to resolve features on the surface of Pluto that are the size of Manhattan Island. Here's an example of just how detailed that is:
(NASA/New Horizons)
So stay tuned: Photos of Pluto unlike any you've ever seen are coming soon.
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