Tag: Charon
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Pluto and Charon as never seen before
A spectacular sampling of imagery from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveals mountains and water ice bedrock on Pluto, an active crust on its largest moon Charon and the first resolved views of the icy world’s tiny mini-moons. A snapshot of Pluto shows fresh deposits of water ice bedrock and 11,000-foot mountains, revealing evidence Pluto’s surface…
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Scientists wowed by new views of ‘psychedelic’ Pluto
Pluto and its Texas-sized moon Charon share an alien environment on the solar system’s outer frontier, with patches of organic ices and diverse rock types illustrated in color imagery released Tuesday. Speaking hours after NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zoomed 7,700 miles from Pluto on the first-ever encounter with the mystery world, scientists said early images…
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Question time with Alan Stern, the Pluto evangelist
Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator, started thinking about a mission to Pluto in the 1980s. Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani July is a month of rich rewards for Alan Stern, the scientist who shepherded the New Horizons spacecraft from the drawing board to Pluto, and the payoff will be sweet. New Horizons comes closest to Pluto…
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Pluto probe provides appetizer for next week’s flyby
New Horizons was about 3.7 million miles (6 million kilometers) from Pluto and Charon when it snapped this portrait late on July 8, 2015. Color data from New Horizons’ Ralph instrument was added to colorize the image. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI Living up to promises that the view from New Horizons will only get better, the Pluto-bound…
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New Horizons in good shape approaching Pluto
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION These images, taken by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), show numerous large-scale features on Pluto’s surface. The distance to Pluto ranges from 47 million kilometers (about 29 million miles) on June 5 to 31 million kilometers (19 million miles) on June 18. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University…