It’s showtime for Pluto; prepare to be amazed by NASA flyby

The speed of New Horizon equals that of light and therefore it takes this long duration for the images to reach Earth since the distance between the Earth and the spacecraft is some 4.7 billion kilometres.

Everyone has heard of Pluto, the dwarf planet formerly known as the solar system’s 9th planet. At one place, Pluto boasts of “exotic ices” ranging from nitrogen to carbon monoxide.

A year after it lifted off, New Horizons swept by Jupiter, getting a turbo boost from the massive planet’s gravitational field.

Pluto’s largest moon Charon, left and Pluto, imaged on July 8, 2015. The yellow and red colors are seen in ultraviolet from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.

The image is the last, best look that anyone will have of Pluto’s far side for decades to come, said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Colorado. NASA says on its website there will be a few images before New Horizons flies through the Pluto system and a few more after the encounter.

“We are coming up on the culmination of all this effort, all this planning”, New Horizons science operations leader Joe Peterson said. On July 14, New Horizons will fly within just 7,750 miles of Pluto.

The image includes a feature that appears to be shaped like a polygon, and a band of distinct terrain that stretches about 1,000 Michigan. across the surface like a compass needle pointing east-northeast.

“The infrared spectrometer on Nasa’s spacecraft has detected frozen methane on Pluto’s surface”, the statement said.

The NASA craft is around the size of a baby grand piano and is the fastest spacecraft ever launched, travelling at around a million miles a day.

The New Horizons spacecraft has been en route to Pluto for over nine years and has traveled over three billion miles during that time.

The mission will complete what NASA calls the reconnaissance of the classical solar system, and it makes the US the first nation to send a space probe to every planet from Mercury to Pluto.

But even now, the space probe’s latest images are starting to give scientists their first real look at Pluto’s surface geology, which appears to be surprisingly complex. This may sound far away, but consider that the spacecraft is a whopping 3 billion miles from Earth. “We have a couple of opportunities to uplink those updated timing information as well as the most precise estimate that we have for Pluto’s orbit and it’s satellites to the spacecraft right before the closest approach”, said Holdridge.