NASA has shared new visualizations of Pluto and its biggest moon Charon to celebrate the first-ever close flyby of the distant worlds, which happened in 2015 when the New Horizons probe made the historic close exploration.
The new video shows simulated flights over the two faraway objects of our solar system in unparalleled detail. Although Pluto and Charon are more than 3 billion miles away from our planet, the new video shows features as small as 70 m on their surface.
“These new high-resolution flyover videos are incredible,” said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern. “They aren’t just scientifically valuable, but they are also engaging, which is why we want to share them with the public.”
Historic flyby data used for videos
The video sheds light on the nitrogen-laden ice sheet located in the Sputnik Planitia impact basin, which forms part of Pluto’s famous “heart.” That area covers a huge chunk of the planet’s southern hemisphere.
The New Horizons team collaborated with moviemaker Paul Schenk to make the videos. They used some of the sharpest images and topographic data gathered by the probe during its flyby in 2015, said the space agency in a statement.
The b/w images were captured by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) as it flew past the dwarf planet at a speed of 30,000 mph. The video starts from the center of the Sputnik Planitia ice sheet and then moves to the basin’s rugged southeastern rim, which is 3.5 km deep.
Pluto’s moon also shown in detail
The color data was also added, thanks to the probe’s Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), allowing for reddish hues in the dwarf planet’s highlands. The flight over Pluto’s moon Charon shows the low-lying icy volcanic plains and then moves to the northern plains around 500 km away.
Several mountains are visible in the video above the volcanic plains. The images in this area show features as small as 140 m across, the space agency officials said. New Horizons recently reached another milestone. The probe has passed 50 astronomical units, which means it has covered a distance that is 50 times Earth’s distance from the Sun. It is only the fifth spacecraft to do so, after the Voyagers 1 and 2 and the Pioneers 10 and 11.
