This Is The First Time We're Seeing A New Planet Up Close, But It's Probably Our Last
NASA's New Horizons captured the image of Pluto.
By John Lim — 15 Jul 2015, 01:35 PM
On 14 July 2015, spacecraft New Horizons returned a gorgeous photo of planet Pluto which was then uploaded on NASA's official Instagram account
NASA said it was giving Instagram an hour-long head start on the first image, posting it to the social media site around 7am ET before officially releasing it, along with the science that explains it, on NASA.gov around 8am ET.
wired.com
At the time of writing, the photo has over 300,000 likes and 11,000 comments.
The photo was nine years and 3 billion miles (4.8 billion km) in the making. In search of Pluto, New Horizons blasted off to space in 2006.
New Horizons probe, which after a nine-year, 3 billion-mile (4.8 billion km) journey, just passed within 7,750 miles (12,472 km) of Pluto’s frozen surface, snapping pictures and taking readings all the way. The images and the data take 4.5 hours to reach Earth even moving at light speed, and most of the time the ship has been in space it has simply been storing what it’s learned in on-board computers.
time.com
The flyby of Pluto is a key moment in the space exploration history and a huge step for mankind
The photo marks the fact that all nine objects considered by many to be the Solar System's planets - from Mercury through to Pluto - have now been visited at least once by a probe.
bbc.comMankind reached the farthest frontier of the solar system Tuesday morning when NASA's New Horizons became the first spacecraft to explore Pluto.
baltimoresun.comVoted by astronomers as dwarf planet for its failure to orbit the Sun, Pluto is actually bigger than expected
Measurements from New Horizons show that it is 2,370 kilometres across, roughly two-thirds the size of Earth’s moon.
Alan Stern, the lead scientist on the $700m (£450m) mission, said the increased dimensions meant Pluto must hold more ice and less rock beneath its surface than researchers had expected. Pluto has been hard to measure with any accuracy from Earth because it is so far away, and its atmosphere creates mirages that can fool ground-based telescopes.
theguardian.com
NASA also released two images of Pluto and its moon, Charon
The image was first made by taking a picture with each of the the three color filters (red, blue, and green) found on the Ralph camera. Those images were then combined and the resulting colors were enhanced. This process lets the team get a more detailed view of surface features — the false colors help scientists understand the boundaries of different geological regions.
theverge.com
This is the first time we will see a planet in this generation and it could be the last too. Guess we got lucky!
We've been striving to explore our solar system, sending spacecraft to each of the planets in turn: Venus and Mars in the 1960s, Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn in the '70s, and Uranus and Neptune in the '80s. These probes showed us entirely new worlds, revealing beautiful moons, rings, atmospheres, and landscapes.
vox.com
But the inventory of major planets — whether you count Pluto as one of those or not — is about to be done. None of us alive today will see a new planet up close for the first time again. In some sense, this is, as Alan Stern, the leader of the New Horizons mission, says, “the last picture show.”
nytimes.com
So what's next for New Horizons? The Kuiper Belt!
If all went well with the planned flyby, New Horizons will soon begin the next major leg of its journey: chasing down a Kuiper Belt object (KBO) that measures at least 30 miles in diameter.
businessinsider.my