New Horizons start sending pictures of multicolored Pluto surface

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NEW DELHI: About 3.5 billion kilometers from Earth, Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft has started sending pictures of Pluto that are revealing bright and dark regions on the surface of the faraway dwarf planet. New Horizons is still 113 million lms from Pluto but the excitement for its close flyby in mid-July is beginning to pick up.
Using sophisticated instruments and new image resolution techniques, scientists interpreted the data to reveal the dwarf planet has broad surface markings – some bright, some dark – including a bright area at one pole that may be a polar cap.
“As we approach the Pluto system we are starting to see intriguing features such as a bright region near Pluto’s visible pole, starting the great scientific adventure to understand this enigmatic celestial object,” says John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for Nasa’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
Also captured in the images is Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, rotating in its 6.4-day long orbit. The exposure times used to create this image set – a tenth of a second – were too short for the camera to detect Pluto’s four much smaller and fainter moons. Since it was discovered in 1930, Pluto has remained an enigma. It orbits our sun about 5 billion kilometers from Earth, and researchers have struggled to discern any details about its surface. These latest New Horizons images allow the mission science team to detect clear differences in brightness across Pluto’s surface as it rotates.
“After traveling more than nine years through space, it’s stunning to see Pluto, literally a dot of light as seen from Earth, becoming a real place right before our eyes,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “These incredible images are the first in which we can begin to see detail on Pluto, and they are already showing us that Pluto has a complex surface.”