New Horizons color images show two faces of Pluto – Orlando Sentinel

Why, you might ask yourself, would the guys who made everyone’s favorite middle school couples’ skate songs on the planet hang out with planetary scientists running humanity’s first mission to study Pluto? New Horizons principal investigator Dr Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) said the difference in the appearance and color of Pluto and Charon was “a real puzzle”.

NASA’s New Horizon’s probe has captured image of Pluto and Charon, its largest moon. But it is finally homing in on its ultimate destination.

In related news, NASA released its latest time-lapse of the Pluto-Charon system as New Horizons draws nearer.

New Horizons’ Mission Operations Center, which is based at Johns Hopkins University, is expected to upload the commands that will drive the observation sequence during the flyby pretty soon. The methane gas detected on Pluto did not come from cows or other bovines, but is a direct remnant from the formation of our Solar System.

After a journey that has lasted more than nine years, the washing machine-sized spacecraft will make its closest approach to Pluto at 21:49:57 AEST, flying just 12,500 kilometres above the dwarf planet’s frozen surface. The hazards team determined that satellites as faint as about 15 times dimmer than Pluto’s faintest known moon, Styx, would have been seen if they existed beyond the orbit of Pluto’s largest and closest moon, Charon.

“We already knew there was methane on Pluto, but these are our first detections”, said Will Grundy, New Horizons Surface Composition team leader with the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. That may have been an artifact of the processing technique called oversampling that New Horizons imaging experts are using to improve the resolution of the instrument. I swear, after a few loops, you can nearly see Pluto get a little closer.

New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program.

“One of my fondest hopes for the flyby, apart from the great science we’ll do, is that people across the world will join in to experience the thrill of science and exploration through New Horizons“, Stern said. However the flyby is so fast, and such a precious opportunity, that the spacecraft will focus entirely on Pluto during the July 14 encounter, at the cost of leaving the scientists and engineers back home in suspense.