I thought this was worth sharing. more photos are expected as the spacecraft, New Horizon, gets closer to Pluto and it's Moon, Charon. it's not spectacular, but its brings out my inner child's sense of wonder and makes me long to be about four years old and start running around the house with a model rocket making 'whooshing' sounds. it's just intriguing thing to think that whilst we are going about our lives here on earth, a probe the size of a grand piano is hurtling through the emptiness of space stretching the limits of human knowledge.
“New Horizons is one of the great explorations of our time,” said New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver at APL[University Applied Physics Laboratory]. “There’s so much we don’t know, not just about Pluto, but other worlds like it. We’re not rewriting textbooks with this historic mission – we’ll be writing them from scratch.”
First Pluto-Charon Color Image from New Horizons | NASA
This image of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, was taken by the Ralph color imager aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on April 9 and downlinked to Earth the following day. It is the first color image ever made of the Pluto system by a spacecraft on approach. The image is a preliminary reconstruction, which will be refined later by the New Horizons science team. Clearly visible are both Pluto and the Texas-sized Charon. The image was made from a distance of about 71 million miles (115 million kilometers)—roughly the distance from the Sun to Venus. At this distance, neither Pluto nor Charon is well resolved by the color imager, but their distinctly different appearances can be seen. As New Horizons approaches its flyby of Pluto on July 14, it will deliver color images that eventually show surface features as small as a few miles across.
“New Horizons is one of the great explorations of our time,” said New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver at APL[University Applied Physics Laboratory]. “There’s so much we don’t know, not just about Pluto, but other worlds like it. We’re not rewriting textbooks with this historic mission – we’ll be writing them from scratch.”
First Pluto-Charon Color Image from New Horizons | NASA
This image of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, was taken by the Ralph color imager aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on April 9 and downlinked to Earth the following day. It is the first color image ever made of the Pluto system by a spacecraft on approach. The image is a preliminary reconstruction, which will be refined later by the New Horizons science team. Clearly visible are both Pluto and the Texas-sized Charon. The image was made from a distance of about 71 million miles (115 million kilometers)—roughly the distance from the Sun to Venus. At this distance, neither Pluto nor Charon is well resolved by the color imager, but their distinctly different appearances can be seen. As New Horizons approaches its flyby of Pluto on July 14, it will deliver color images that eventually show surface features as small as a few miles across.
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