A Day on Pluto and Charon

Charon, like Pluto, rotates once every 6.4 Earth days.

The space agency released a series of 10 close-ups of the frosty, faraway world on Friday (Nov 20), representing one full rotation, or Pluto day. Images via New Horizons spacecraft, via NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.

The images in the collages were taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft between July 7th and 13th, as the spacecraft prepared to fly by Pluto. The pictures were captured using the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera.

The recent July flyby just reveals one side of Pluto and Charon, but in these new sequences, the probe began recording observations before its closest approach, showing a glimpse of the binary system’s other, far side.

And don’t forget Charon, Pluto’s large moon.

While the new set of images illustrates how they turn over the course of a day, Pluto and Charon are not shown in their entirety.

New Horizons launched in 2006 on a lengthy mission to study Pluto and its satellites. The side New Horizons saw in most detail, during closest approach on July 14, 2015, is at the 12 o’clock position. Pluto is about 3 billion miles (5 billion km) from Earth.

NASA said that a side called the “encounter hemisphere” was seen in more detail by the New Horizons spacecraft. Pluto and Charon always keep a single face toward each other. The pictures that were captured at the same time when the camera took Pluto’s details contain numerous moon’s signature features like uplands, canyons and rolling plains of the Vulcan Planum. The closest approach was completed on July 14 at a distance of 7,800 miles above Pluto’s surface.