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Wow! Just 12 days and 16 million kilometres from its historic flyby of Pluto, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is giving us an amazing look at the faces of this little-known world.

Two faces of Pluto emerge in latest NASA photographs


Scott Sutherland
Meteorologist/Science Writer

Thursday, July 2, 2015, 11:04 AM - Wow! Just 12 days and 16 million kilometres from its historic flyby of Pluto, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is giving us an amazing look at the faces of this little-known world.

After nearly nine and a half years of speeding towards an encounter that will give us our first close-up look at Pluto, Charon and the other moons in orbit around them, New Horizons crossed over the 16-million-kilometre mark on the 1st of July. That's still over 40 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon, but the images the probe is returning to us are already exceptional.

In the animation below, we can see how the dwarf planet and its moon, Charon, are growing larger in the spacecraft's view.


Credit: NASA-JHUAPL-SwRI


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The truly exceptional part is that the latest images in that sequence have either the barest amount of processing and sharpening, or no processing at all. The surface of Pluto is becoming clearer every day now, and the New Horizons team at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory released these latest colourized pictures, treating us to an incredible look at the two faces of the dwarf planet.


A combination of some of the latest Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) images of Pluto and Charon, coloured using data from the spacecraft's Ralph instrument. Credit: NASA-JHUAPL-SwRI


Annotated version showing Pluto's rotational orientation and which side of the planet will be visible during closest approach and flyby. Credit: NASA-JHUAPL-SwRI

According to the JHU Applied Physics Laboratory website:

New color images from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft show two very different faces of the mysterious dwarf planet, one with a series of intriguing spots along the equator that are evenly spaced. Each of the spots is about 300 miles in diameter, with a surface area that's roughly the size of the state of Missouri.
Scientists have yet to see anything quite like the dark spots; their presence has piqued the interest of the New Horizons science team, due to the remarkable consistency in their spacing and size. While the origin of the spots is a mystery for now, the answer may be revealed as the spacecraft continues its approach to the mysterious dwarf planet. "It's a real puzzle — we don't know what the spots are, and we can't wait to find out," said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder. "Also puzzling is the longstanding and dramatic difference in the colors and appearance of Pluto compared to its darker and grayer moon Charon."

July 14 is the date to mark on your calendar for the best images we've ever seen of these distant bodies, and very likely the best we will see for some time. However, stay tuned in the days between now and then, to watch the images get better, the other moons come into view, and the surface come into sharper focus!

Sources: NASA | John Hopkins University

WATCH BELOW: The New Horizons team from a year ago, detailing what they hope to see and learn during this historic flyby!

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