Amazing Photo of the Day: New Horizons Image of Pluto Shows a Gigantic “Heart”
Credits: NASA-JHUAPL-SWRIIt took 9 years for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to travel three billion miles to the orbit of Pluto in the farthest reaches of our Solar System, and on July 14 the spacecraft will make its closest approach to the mysterious planet. But it’s already sending back incredible images, like this one taken yesterday when the craft was about 5 million miles away from Pluto, in which you can see some of the intriguing surface features that are sending astronomers into transports of ecstasy today.
This view is centered roughly on the area that will be seen close-up during New Horizons’ July 14 closest approach. This side of Pluto is dominated by three broad regions of varying brightness. Most prominent are an elongated dark feature at the equator, informally known as “the whale,” and a large heart-shaped bright area measuring some 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) across on the right. Above those features is a polar region that is intermediate in brightness.
“The next time we see this part of Pluto at closest approach, a portion of this region will be imaged at about 500 times better resolution than we see today,” said Jeff Moore, Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team Leader of NASA’s Ames Research Center. “It will be incredible!”
