NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft completed its near decade-long mission to Pluto with a flyby of the dwarf planet and its moons in July, capturing the best images we have to date.
NASA has collected these images into the above animation, showing the flyby from the spacecraft’s point of view, including a close encounter with Pluto, a pass behind the planet revealing its atmospheric glow lit by the sun, and a pass behind Charon, Pluto’s largest moon. The animation ends with a wide view of Pluto and Charon as New Horizons makes its departure.
After New Horizons left Pluto behind, NASA announced a potential new destination for the spacecraft: a Kuiper Belt object (KBO) known as 2014 MU69 that is nearly a billion miles away from Pluto. “2014 MU69 is a great choice because it is just the kind of ancient KBO, formed where it orbits now, that the Decadal Survey desired us to fly by,” New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colo., said in a press release. “Moreover, this KBO costs less fuel to reach [than other candidate targets], leaving more fuel for the flyby, for ancillary science, and greater fuel reserves to protect against the unforeseen.”
See New Horizons' Best Images of Pluto
An enhanced color global view of pluto released on July 24, 2015. NASA/ReutersIn the center left of Pluto’s vast heart-shaped feature – informally named “Tombaugh Regio” - lies a vast, craterless plain that appears to be no more than 100 million years old, and is possibly still being shaped by geologic processes. This frozen region is north of Pluto’s icy mountains and has been informally named Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain), after Earth’s first artificial satellite. The image was acquired on July 14 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers).NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research InstituteA close-up image of a region near Pluto's equator shows a range of mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft as it passed within 7,800 feet of the dwarf planet on July 14, 2015.NASA/Getty ImagesA newly discovered mountain range lies near the southwestern margin of Pluto’s heart-shaped Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region), situated between bright, icy plains and dark, heavily-cratered terrain. NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research InstituteA composite image of Pluto and its largest moon Charon collected separately by New Horizons during approach on July 13 and July 14, 2015. The relative reflectivity, size, separation, and orientations of Pluto and Charon are approximated in this composite image, and they are shown in approximate true color. NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI Pluto, seen from the New Horizons spacecraft on July 13, 2015 just before the space craft's historic fly-by.NASA/APNASA's New Horizons captured this high-resolution enhanced color view of Charon just before closest approach on July 14, 2015.NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research InstituteA close up view of Pluto's largest moon, Charon.NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI Pluto on July 14, 2015, as seen by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft while it looked back toward the sun.NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
