On July 14, 2015, after nine and a half years journeying across the Solar System, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made its historic close pass of Pluto and its moon Charon. Traveling a relative velocity of nearly 13.8 km/s (that’s almost 31,000 mph!) New Horizons passed through the Pluto system in a matter of hours but the views it captured from approach to departure held the world spellbound with their unexpected beauty. Those images and data – along with a bit of imagination – have been used by space imaging enthusiast Björn Jónsson to create an animation of New Horizons’ Pluto pass as if we were traveling along with the spacecraft – check it out above.
You can find more science images and discoveries about Pluto and Charon from New Horizons here, and see more renderings and animations by Jónsson on his website here.
I notice some features on the dark side at :10 seconds, near the right limb. I don’t recall seeing them before. I wonder if they have been able to tease out any more detail from immediately after the flyby, or was that composited from images taken earlier?
I suggest that the location of Earth is marked too by a blue dot. But maybe it is too close to the Sun’s glare?
Nooice!