As NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft sailed past Pluto, collecting invaluable science data, the space agency’s Cassini orbiter turned its gaze in that direction from its outpost at Saturn.
This image of Pluto (center) was taken on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 2.4 billion miles (3.9 billion km). Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.
Cassini took a break from its duties to capture this far-off portrait around the time of the New Horizons encounter with Pluto.
The image was taken within a few minutes of New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, around 7:49 a.m. EDT (4:49 a.m. PDT, 11:49 a.m. GMT) on July 14, 2015.
It was obtained using Cassini’s narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 2.4 billion miles (3.9 billion km) from the dwarf planet.
After New Horizons, the Cassini orbiter was the closest spacecraft to Pluto at the time of the flyby.
Pluto is the bright dot closest to the center of the field of stars seen in this view.
This is a labeled version of the image; the four stars have visual magnitudes between about 11 and 12. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.
The entire Pluto system – the dwarf planet and its five known moons: Charon, Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos – is below the resolution of this image, thus the small bright specks near the main dot representing Pluto are likely noise.
Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, as well as the planet’s other moons would not be resolved at this scale.
