NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has sent back the first few of a series of the sharpest views of Pluto it obtained during its July flyby.
The New Horizons, launched in 2006, flew past the icy dwarf planet Pluto and its moons on July 14, 2015, taking some of the highest-resolution images of the planet that we have ever seen.
The spacecraft obtained intricate pattern of “pits” across a section of Pluto’s prominent heart-shaped region, informally named Tombaugh Region.
NASA also released another photo of the dwarf planet adding low-resolution colour data to create the new image. The images form a strip 50 miles (80 km) wide, trending from Pluto’s jagged horizon about 500 miles (800 kilometres) northwest of the informally named Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi mountains, over the shoreline of Sputnik, and across its icy plains.
The images are the part of a sequence taken by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) as the spacecraft passed within 9,550 miles (15,400 km) of Pluto’s surface, just 13 minutes before the time of its closest approach in July 2015.
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