Are We There Yet?
April 15, 2015
After almost a decade of traveling, New Horizons is on Pluto’s doorstep. Yesterday, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released the first color image of the dwarf planet taken by the probe, using a digital imager nicknamed “Ralph.”
On April 9, this image of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, was taken by the “Ralph” color-imager aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. It is the first color image ever made of the Pluto system by an approaching spacecraft. Both Pluto and the Texas-sized Charon are clearly visible. The image was taken from a distance of about 71 million miles (115 million kilometers)—roughly the distance from the Sun to Venus. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
New Horizons is the first space probe sent to study Pluto. NASA launched New Horizons on Jan. 19, 2006. The main goal of the mission is to explore Pluto and its large moon, Charon. Mission managers also hope to encounter one or more other objects in the Kuiper belt, a band of icy bodies largely beyond the orbit of Neptune.
On its way to the Kuiper belt, the probe studied Jupiter and its moons during a flyby in early 2007. One camera captured a volcanic eruption on Io. The plume of the erupted material stretched roughly 200 miles (320 kilometers) above the moon’s surface. Instruments also found clouds of ammonia near Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and gathered new information on the structure of Jupiter’s magnetic field.
The image of Pluto is still not as clear as those taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits Earth. Even though New Horizons is closer to Pluto, Hubble can take pictures at a much higher resolution. (Resolution is a measure of an instrument’s ability to show detail.) Starting in May, however, New Horizons’ closer distance will allow it to take far more detailed pictures of Pluto and its moons than Hubble ever could.
New Horizons will reach its closest point to Pluto and Charon on July 14, 2015, traveling by at great speed. After observing Pluto, the probe will continue on, and scientists hope that it will glimpse other objects as it leaves the solar system.
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