New Horizons snaps Pluto from eight million km says news
New Horizons has acquired yet another stunning view of Pluto. The US space agency probe captured the latest image on Tuesday when it was just under eight million km from the dwarf world. As of Thursday, New Horizons had moved to within six million km, heading for its historic flyby next week.
The new picture was the first to be returned following the computer hiccup at the weekend that saw the probe briefly drop communications with Earth. The face of Pluto seen in the image is broadly that which will be examined in detail on 14 July. It includes a large dark region near Pluto's equator, dubbed "the whale", and a roughly heart-shaped bright area spanning 2,000km.
Weird world
At closest approach, New Horizons will be about 12,500km above the surface. Its high-resolution camera Lorri should then be able to discern features at a resolution better than 100m per pixel. Lorri is responsible for the view seen on this page, too, but the colour information has been overlaid from the probe's other camera, Ralph. "They're still a little blurry but they're by far the best pictures we've ever seen of Pluto, and they're only going to get better," said John Spencer from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado, US, one of the New Horizons co-investigators.
The flyby occurs on the 50th anniversary of the first successful American pass of Mars by the Mariner 4 spacecraft.
By way of comparison, New Horizons will gather 5,000 times as much data at Pluto than Mariner did at the Red Planet.
New Horizons' difficulty is getting all that information back to Earth. The distance to Pluto is vast - more than 4.5 billion km - and this makes for very low bit rates.
It will take 16 months to send back all the science acquired over the coming days
Is that not incredible or not?? and that news is just from one solar system.. we have billions and billions out there.. STUPID PEOPLE TALK ABOUT STUPID GOD..GODS..ALLAH doll and and waste tons money, tons time and tons of innocent lives for no good reason but some cave dwellers wrote some books in the name of some god some 1000s of years ago..
get over the shit get back to thinking one planet .. one humanity ., . cut the tails and stop acting like un-evolved monkeys, and baboons
Topic: New Horizons snaps Pluto from eight million km says news