In July, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will make its closest pass of Pluto, giving us a closer look at a body living in a little known region of our solar system. While it still has millions of miles left to go, New Horizons still has a treat for everyone as it has taken the first ever color image of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon.
While this new image is blurry and somewhat unimpressive, it is still the first of its kind. At a news conference Tuesday, NASA scientists explained that at New Horizons' current resolution, the Earth would be so blurry that continents couldn't be distinguished. But by the time the spacecraft is at its closest approach, the pictures taken will have resolution so high that comparable pictures of Earth would reveal a birds-eye view of New York City, with features like Central Park and the Hudson River fully visible. The images we'll see of Pluto and its moons will be truly unprecedented.
"This is pure exploration; we're going to turn points of light into a planet and a system of moons before your eyes!" Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, said in a statement. "New Horizons is flying to Pluto - the biggest, brightest and most complex of the dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt. This 21st century encounter is going to be an exploration bonanza unparalleled in anticipation since the storied missions of Voyager in the 1980s."
At the news conference, Stern pointed out that about half the population of the United States is young enough to have never seen the encounter of an unexplored planet for the first time, until now.
Beginning in July, New Horizons will begin to furiously collect data about the tiny dwarf planet in the out edges of our solar system. So much data will be collected, in fact, that it will take 16 months just to send it all back home, extending long past the spacecraft's actual flyby.
NASA launched New Horizons in 2006 to study Pluto and other objects in the Kuiper belt, located about 2.5 to 4.5 billion miles from the Sun. Already New Horizons has snapped some impressive images of Jupiter back in 2006 and 2007.
In July, it will begin its study of Pluto and its moons but in the meantime you can expect the craft to begin taking more and more impressive pictures of this tiny dwarf planet as it slowly meanders its way around the Sun.
