NASA's New Horizon's spacecraft is already on target for an historic rendezvous with Pluto in July, but while it travels it continues to snap new images of the little dwarf planet. The new images reveal even more detail about its complex and high contrast surface.
The new images were taken from just under 77 million kilometers away using the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on the New Horizons's spacecraft.
"As New Horizons closes in on Pluto, it is transforming from a point of light to a planetary object of intense interest. We are in for an exciting ride for the next seven weeks," says Jim Green, Nasa's director of planetary Science.
Pluto's rotation is quite a bit slower than the Earth's, as it takes 6.4 Earth Days for it to rotate around its axis and the new images show the variations in Pluto's surface features during its rotation.
NASA scientists used a technique known as image deconvolution to sharpen the raw, unprocessed photos that were sent back to Earth from New Horizons.
"These new images show us that Pluto's differing faces are each distinct; likely hinting at what may be very complex surface geology or variations in surface composition from place to place," says Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator.
The new images also seem to support the hypothesis that Pluto has a polar cap whose extent varies with longitude. Astronomers will be able to make a definitive determination of the polar bright region's iciness when they receive compositional spectroscopy of that region in July.
New Horizon's covers a distance of approximately 750,000 miles per day and will reach Pluto in July. As it approaches, it will continue to snap even more pictures that will dramatically improve in quality over the coming weeks as it gets closer and closer. Currently, the New Horizons spacecraft is about 2.95 billion miles from home.
New Horizons was originally approved in 2001 as a part of the New Frontiers Program and blasted off from Cape Canaveral on January 19, 2006. New Horizons first had a brief encounter with an asteroid before proceeding to Jupiter, flying by at a distance of 2.3 million kilometers. On January 15, 2015, New Horizons began its approach phase to Pluto. On July 14, New Horizons will become the first human spacecraft to every flyby Pluto in an historic mission designed to learn more about the mysterious dwarf planet situated in the distant regions of the Solar System.
