After a nine year, 3 billion mile journey, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is now getting close enough to Pluto that researchers can begin to make out details on the dwarf planets surface. In the latest series of images received from the distant spacecraft, lighter and darker regions on Pluto have begun to emerge including a very bright spot which scientists believe may be a polar cap.
The images of Pluto are 175 years in the making. Pluto was first predicted, using Newtonian mechanics, in the 1840s. It was dubbed “Planet X” by Percival Lowell who founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. Lowell started an extensive project in 1894 to search for a possible ninth planet but pluto wasn’t actually seen until 1930 and then it was only a pale dot.
Since its discovery pluto has been downgraded to a dwarf planet and five moons have been discovered but, even using the best telescopes, pluto has largely remained a bright dot on a black background.
The latest round of images from New Horizons were captured in mid-April at a distance of 70 million miles using a the telescopic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) camera. Before the images are transmitted they are shrpened using a technique called “image deconvolution”.
“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. As we get closer, the excitement is building in our quest to unravel the mysteries of Pluto using data from New Horizons,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington in a statement.
The spacecraft also sent images of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, but the exposure times were too short to capture the dwarf planet’s smaller moons.
“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. 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,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Between now and the arrival of New Horizons at Pluto in July, the spacecraft will continue to return “the best images of Pluto ever” on a regular basis.
“We can only imagine what surprises will be revealed when New Horizons passes approximately 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) above Pluto’s surface this summer,” said Hal Weaver, the mission’s project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.
