Newly-processed, HD, color video of what pulling away from Pluto looked like to the New Horizons spacecraft.
Since it’s Pluto Flyby day, let’s learn a bit more about the Kuiper Belt, home of Pluto.
A small piece of metal is almost within the Pluto-Charon system, a couple more Earth days and less than 1 Pluto Day! Here’s the story of this mission elegantly told.
Pluto, 4 million kilometers
I’m pretty sure we’re contractually obligated to share the new images of Pluto within a few hours after NASA provides them. We’ll get more new images on Sunday and Monday, but then on Tuesday we won’t, because during the flyby itself the New Horizons spacecraft will be collecting data automatically and will not transmit data to Earth. It will take until Wednesday before we get the first up-close, fly-by image of Pluto.
Aside from that, here’s the image sent by the New Horizons spacecraft to Earth on Saturday. The spacecraft was ~4 million kilometers from Pluto when it took this shot, an improvement of about a million kilometers over the distance from yesterday’s image. Pluto has rotated slightly, moving some of the features seen yesterday out of frame to the right while improving the resolution on the migrating features across its surface that looked like fractures pattern in yesterday’s shots.
-JBB
Image credit: NASA/JHU/APL http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/new-horizons-last-portrait-of-pluto-s-puzzling-spots
Source: facebook.com