Click on image to enlarge.
Pluto’s Close-up, Now in Color
This enhanced color mosaic
combines some of the sharpest views of Pluto that NASA’s New Horizons
spacecraft obtained during its July 14 flyby.
Click on image to enlarge.
Zigzagging across Pluto
Release Date: December 16, 2015
This high-resolution swath of Pluto (right) sweeps
over the cratered plains at the west of the New Horizons’ encounter
hemisphere and across numerous prominent faults, skimming the eastern
margin of the dark, forbidding region informally known as Cthulhu Regio,
and finally passing over the mysterious, possibly cryovolcanic edifice
Wright Mons, before reaching the terminator or day-night line. Among the
many notable details shown are the overlapping and infilling
relationships between units of the relatively smooth, bright volatile
ices from Sputnik Planum (at the edge of the mosaic) and the dark edge
or “shore” of Cthulhu. The pictures in this mosaic were taken by the
Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) in “ride-along” mode with the
LEISA spectrometer, which accounts for the ‘zigzag’ or step pattern.
Taken shortly before New Horizons’ July 14 closest approach to Pluto,
details as small as 500 yards (500 meters) can be seen. NOTE: Click on
the image and ZOOM IN for optimal viewing.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Zooming in on Pluto’s Pattern of Pits
On July 14, 2015, the
telescopic camera on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft took the highest
resolution images ever obtained of the intricate pattern of “pits”
across a section of Pluto’s prominent heart-shaped region, informally
named Tombaugh Regio.
New Horizons' Very Best View of Pluto (movie)
This movie is
composed of the sharpest views of Pluto that NASA’s New Horizons
spacecraft obtained during its flyby of the distant planet on July 14,
2015.
Source - NASA
