04 December 2015

Pluto, very close


Rico's friend Kelley forwards this Verge article by Sean O'Kane about space:
NASA has just released the highest resolution photographs (above) of the surface of Pluto from the New Horizons flyby. The images were taken about ten thousand miles above the surface of Pluto, just fifteen minutes before the spacecraft's closest approach.
These are also the highest quality images that the spacecraft will ever send back, because they are lossless, or uncompressed. In contrast, the images that were sent back to Earth this summer were compressed in order to transfer more files faster. In a sense, they acted as preview images intended to show what was still to come when New Horizons had the time to transmit the full data set. (The spacecraft began a year-long process of downloading the remaining data this past September.)
While it feels like we've become intimately familiar with Pluto since the flyby, no one (outside the New Horizons team) has seen the distant world in detail like this before. Features like the interior walls of the craters in Pluto's surface are shown in stunning new detail, as are the pitted icy plains. Where we previously saw mountain ranges, now we see individual mountains.
Rico says the universe continues to amaze...

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