NASA releases ‘breathtaking’ up-close photos of Pluto

“These close-up images, showing the diversity of terrain on Pluto, demonstrate the power of our robotic planetary explorers to return intriguing data to scientists back here on planet Earth”, said John Grunsfeld from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

Take a look into the dark depths of our solar system at this distant celestial object orbiting 3.3 billion miles from the sun and somebody please pass me the saline solution, I’m fogging up again!

Pluto’s details pop in this newly colorized high-resolution mosaic photo from NASA.

“New Horizons thrilled us during the July fly-by with the first close images of Pluto, and as the spacecraft transmits the treasure trove of images in its on-board memory back to us, we continue to be amazed by what we see”.

Now, just days after releasing the highest quality photos of the dwarf planet’s pockmarked and mountainous surface, NASA has put together a visualization of what New Horizons encountered between January and July on its way to Pluto.

You are looking at one of the most-distant objects in our solar system.

The clouds, known as coronal mass ejections, can be seen around Earth.

Space weather scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center combined a series of models used to predict the behavior of solar radiation.

The new findings revealed that although vacuum of space is about a thousand times emptier than a laboratory vacuum, it’s still not completely empty.

This new, combined model tracks CMEs longer than ever before and has been named the Enlil model after the Sumerian god of the wind.

Because particles must travel for many months before reaching Pluto, the CMEs eventually spread out and merge with other CMEs and the solar wind to form larger clouds of particles and magnetic field. What surprised scientists, though, was that as they reached Pluto, the clouds didn’t have their characteristic “balloon shape” anymore.