When the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto last year, we got our first closeup glimpse of this mysterious world three billion miles away.
Pluto. Image Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
New Horizons launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida in 2006. The spacecraft flew by Pluto in 2015, coming closest to the icy world on July 14, 2015.
Last week, the mission sent back the last of its data from the flyby. It has taken 15 months to send back all of the data. How much is there? More than 50 gigabits!
Through NASA’s Deep Space Network, the last of the information was received by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.
Some amazing discoveries have been made by the team led by New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, including the complexity of Pluto and its moon system, Pluto’s active surface tectonics, and the possibility of a water-ice ocean under the surface. The team also discovered a heart-shape nitrogen glacier on the surface (the largest glacier yet discovered in the solar system) and that the atmosphere of Pluto is blue.
Pluto haze layers. Image Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
Instruments onboard New Horizons studied the atmosphere, took pictures and provided different types of maps, including color, composition and thermal. More instruments collected data at large distances, studied Pluto’s interaction with the solar wind, and measured plasma coming from the dwarf planet’s atmosphere.
A closeup of Pluto. Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Really far away got a lot closer when the New Horizons mission flew by Pluto last year. After traveling three billion miles from Earth, the spacecraft gave us our first closeup images of this mysterious world.
A long, long way from Earth, New Horizons will continue onward in an extended mission. What’s on the agenda for the spacecraft? It will observe multiple objects in the Kuiper Belt, an area with icy bodies that includes dwarf planets and comets.
Learn more about this continuing mission at NASA.gov.