The View to Pluto is Improving

A Point of Light Becomes a World

Things are really heating up for the New Horizons flyby of Pluto. Team members are converging on the Applied Physics Lab in Maryland (the control center for the mission), and they’re already studying fascinating science and images flowing back to us from across the solar system. Pluto is getting more and more real all the time!

The last time I was this excited about seeing a distant world was during the Voyager missions, which visited the outer solar system gas giants and gave us the first very high-resolution images of those worlds. Now, it’s Pluto’s turn, and the view just keeps getting better. Take a look at these two images from just the last couple of months.

The latest one, taken May 12, 2015, from a distance of 46.6 million miles, shows some distinct differences in brightness across the surface. My friend Alan Stern (who is the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission) explained that they showing some kind of complex surface geology, or at least some variations of what’s on the surface in different places. “These images also continue to support the hypothesis that Pluto has a polar cap whose extent varies with longitude,” he said, pointing out that his science team will be able to definitely figure out the composition of the material of the icy materials in the polar caps in July. That’s when the spacecraft and its spectrometers will get their chance to analyze the surface.

As the spacecraft gets closer, we should really start to get some startling views. In just a few weeks, late June, the images will have four times more resolution than the images we’re seeing here. That will improve until close approach, when the images will be an astounding 5,000 times the resolution. With that kind of clarity, I really hope we’ll be able to see some pretty decent details of the surface — perhaps craters, cliffs (if they exist), and cracks in the surface.

It has to be incredibly exciting for the New Horizons team — a journey of well more than 10 years (when you count the development time for the mission, PLUS the trip time from Earth to Pluto) — is about to culminate in the discoveries of a lifetime. And, they’re discoveries we can all follow along and enjoy. Stay tuned!