The Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has snapped yet another amazing view of the dwarf planet.
This image of Pluto from New Horizons was received on July 8, 2015, and has been combined with color information from the spacecraft’s Ralph instrument. The image was taken on July 7, when New Horizons was 5 million miles (8 million km) from the dwarf planet. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
This view is centered roughly on the area that will be seen close-up during the spacecraft’s historic July 14 flyby of the faraway dwarf planet.
This side of the planet is dominated by three broad regions of varying brightness.
Most prominent are an elongated dark feature at the equator, nicknamed the whale, and a large heart-shaped bright area measuring some 1,200 miles (2,000 km) across on the right.
Above those features is a polar region that is intermediate in brightness.
“The next time we see this part of Pluto at closest approach, a portion of this region will be imaged at about 500 times better resolution than we see today. It will be incredible,” said Dr Jeff Moore of NASA’s Ames Research Center, a science team member for New Horizons.
Currently the New Horizons is approximately 3.7 million miles (6 million km) from the Pluto system.
The space probe is healthy and all systems are operating normally.
