LONDON: NASA’s New Horizons mission is kicking off its climactic month of July with amazing views that clearly show Pluto’s black spots and Charon’s dark pole growing in the spacecraft’s virtual windshield.
After traveling for nine years and 3 billion miles, the New Horizons probe is less than two weeks and 9.5 million miles (15.2 million kilometers) away from Pluto. Every day is bringing improvements in image size and quality. Images from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, or LORRI, show patterns of dark and light areas on Pluto — including that dark patch, which looks a lot like a racing stripe, and a series of spots.
“We don’t know what the spots are,” the mission’s principal investigator, Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, said in news release, “and we can’t wait to find out.”
In a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” chat session, New Horizons team member Amanda Zangari compared Pluto to Triton, a moon of Neptune. Researchers believe Triton was a cousin of Pluto’s in the icy Kuiper Belt that happened to be captured in Neptunian orbit.
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