New Horizons snapped a close-up of Pluto on July 13, just before it went dark for the duration of its closest approach. Credits: NASA/APL/SwRI
New Horizons Transforms Pluto from a Speck to a Sphere [Slide Show]
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First, one of the latest and greatest views from New Horizons: the spacecraft captured the above image of mountains near Pluto's equator just 90 minutes before its closest approach to the dwarf planet... Credit: NASA-JHUAPL-SwRI
When he was just a new hire at the Lowell Observatory, Clyde Tombaugh was charged with the rather tedious task of examining thousands of photographic plates of the sky. His mission: find the outer solar system planet predicted by Percival Lowell 15 years earlier, which was thought to be responsible for anomalies in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune... Lowell Observatory Archives
Almost half a century after Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto, images taken with the Kaj Strand Astrometric Reflector at the U.S. Naval Observatory Flagstaff Station provided the first glimpse of its largest moon, Charon... Credit: U.S. Naval Observatory
On February 21, 1994, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope provided the clearest view yet of Pluto and its partner in crime, Charon. Astronomers were excited about the image because it shows the dwarf planet and its moon as two distinct objects... Credit: Dr. R. Albrecht, ESA/ESO Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility; NASA
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Sixty-six years after Pluto's initial discovery, astronomers were finally able to discern some of its surface features with the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble snapped pictures as Pluto rotated over the course of nearly a week, revealing the dwarf planet's bright and dark spots as well as polar ice caps... Credit: Alan Stern (Southwest Research Institute), Marc Buie (Lowell Observatory), NASA and ESA
The pictures above were constructed from multiple Hubble images taken in 2002–03. The dark orange, white and black terrain revealed that Pluto had undergone a dramatic change in color between 2000 and 2002, with its north pole getting brighter and the surface turning redder... Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Buie (Southwest Research Institute)
In 2005 two new members were added to Pluto's far-flung little family: Nix and Hydra. New Horizons team members discovered the two moons using the Hubble Telescope. Nix and Hydra remained hidden for so long because they are thousands of times fainter than Pluto and don't hug their host planet as closely as Charon does, orbiting two to three times farther out... Credit: NASA/ESA/H.Weaver/A.Stern
These two pictures were taken a couple weeks apart during the summer of 2011 by scientists using--you guessed it--the Hubble Space Telescope. The green circle marks the spot of Pluto's newest moon, then designated P4 but later rebranded as Kerberos after the hellhound from classical mythology, in accordance with the tradition of giving Pluto's satellites names associated with the god of the underworld... Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Showalter (SETI Institute)
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A year after Kerberos's discovery, Hubble hit on Pluto's fifth and final moon, Styx in 2012. The team of scientists that found Styx were actually scouring Pluto's neighborhood for objects that might prove hazardous to New Horizons during its flyby... Credit: NASA / ESA / M. Showalter / SETI Institute
New Horizons captured this composite image as it was closing in on Pluto and Charon on July 11, showing the two bodies in unprecedented detail. The picture gives us a new appreciation for the distinct color and brightness differences between Pluto and its largest moon... Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
New Horizons snapped a close-up of Pluto on July 13, just before it went dark for the duration of its closest approach. For technical reasons, the spacecraft was out of touch with Earth on July 14 as it collected data, but this image sheds new light on Pluto’s surface features... NASA/APL/SwRI
This picture of Nix might not look like much compared to the spectacular images New Horizons is getting of Pluto's terrain. But the fact that Nix shows up as a conglomerate of pixels rather than just one lone dot is pretty incredible... Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
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From only 77,000 kilometers, on July 14 New Horizons could discern surface features on Pluto a mere kilometer across. In the left center of Pluto’s “heart,” north of the icy mountains, lies a vast, smooth plane that appears to be upwards of 100 million years old... NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
This week the Internet is flush with photos of Pluto from the New Horizons mission. To someone who is not necessarily a Plutophile, it might be kind of difficult to see what all the hype is about. After all, the Hubble Space Telescope has shown us galaxies near the edge of the observable universe. What’s so exciting about seeing a dwarf planet in our own solar system?
Setting aside the fact that New Horizons’ safe arrival means that scientists successfully guided a piano-size robot across the solar system for nearly a decade, the New Horizons flyby is momentous because the spacecraft is churning out photos that show Pluto in unprecedented detail. To really appreciate how striking our new views of Pluto are, let’s take a look back at photos of the former ninth planet, now Kuiper Belt object, from the earliest glimpses to the New Horizons pictures.
Maria is very excited to be working as a AAAS Mass Media Fellow for Scientific American this summer. She's a double major in physics and creative writing, and hopes to pursue a Master's degree in science writing after graduation.
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