NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has beamed back its best-yet images of the dwarf planet Pluto and Charon, Pluto’s largest moon.
This image, taken May 13, 2015, shows the dwarf planet Pluto and its moon Charon. Image credit: NASA / JHU-APL / SwRI.
The images were taken May 12-13 from just under 50 million miles (77 million km) away, using the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on the spacecraft.
“As New Horizons closes in on Pluto, it’s transforming from a point of light to a planetary object of intense interest. We’re in for an exciting ride for the next seven weeks,” said Jim Green, NASA’s Director of Planetary Science.
In the April 2015 images, New Horizons team determined that Pluto has broad surface markings – some bright, some dark – including a bright area at one pole that may be a polar cap.
The newer imagery shows the scientists that Pluto’s differing faces are each distinct. It also continues to support the hypothesis that the dwarf planet has a polar cap whose extent varies with longitude.
This image of the dwarf planet Pluto was taken May 12. Image credit: NASA / JHU-APL / SwRI.
“We will be able to make a definitive determination of the polar bright region’s iciness when we get compositional spectroscopy of that region in July,” said Dr Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute.
The images New Horizons returns will dramatically improve in coming weeks as the spacecraft speeds closer to its July 14 encounter with the Pluto system.
Following a January 2006 launch, the spacecraft is currently about 2.95 billion miles from Earth.
