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OUTER PLANETS
Composite images compare sunlit faces of Pluto
by Brooks Hays
Pasadena, Calif. (UPI) Nov 20, 2015


On approach to Pluto in July 2015, the cameras on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft captured the planet rotating over the course of a full Pluto day. The best available images of each side of Pluto taken during approach have been combined to create this view of a full rotation. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.

New composite images released by NASA show Pluto lit up by the sun. The images were taken by New Horizons' cameras as the probe approached the dwarf planet and its moon.

The fully illuminated portraits are arranged like the face of a clock, each of them revealing different portions rotating in front of the sun's rays. A full rotation is achieved as the eyes follow the changing faces around the clock.

Each portrait is a composite image, combining the sharpest versions of each half. The blurrier halves reveal the sides of Pluto and Charon that were facing away when the probe made its closest approach.

The farthest and most blurry of the Pluto shots was taken at a distance of 5 million miles, snapped on July 7. The sharper half shows Pluto and its heart-shaped feature, Tombaugh Regio, from 400,000 miles, taken on July 13.

New Horizons is now many hundreds of thousands of miles away from Pluto, pushing into the Kuiper Belt and setting its sights on even more distant and mysterious objects at the edge of the solar system.


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Previous Report
OUTER PLANETS
Scientists study nitrogen provision for Pluto's atmosphere
San Antonio TX (SPX) Aug 12, 2015
The latest data from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft reveal diverse features on Pluto's surface and an atmosphere dominated by nitrogen gas. However, Pluto's small mass allows hundreds of tons of atmospheric nitrogen to escape into space each hour. So where does all this nitrogen come from? Dr. Kelsi Singer, a postdoctoral researcher at Southwest Research Institute, and her mentor Dr. Alan ... read more


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