14 DAY TRIAL // It was just a few days ago that the New Horizons probe at long last completed its much-awaited flyby of the Pluto system at the edge of the Solar System, and images revealing intriguing landscapes on the dwarf planet's surface are now pouring in.
Always the entertainers, mission scientists over at NASA used some of the views of Pluto that the New Horizons probe has so far beamed back to Earth to put together an animated video simulating a flight over the orb's surface.
The video in question, available below, made it online just yesterday. It has since been viewed tens of thousands of times. Apparently, there are a whole lot of space enthusiasts here on Earth.
The images included in this animated flyover of Pluto show the dwarf planet's Norgay Montes (Norgay Mountains), named after Everest explorer Tenzing Norgay, and an intriguing terrain named Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain) after Earth's first artificial satellite.
Apparently, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft obtained these views of Pluto from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers) on July 14, the very day of its historic flyby of the dwarf planet.
The images, produced by the probe's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, are so detailed that even features as small as 0.5 miles (roughly 1 kilometers) across are easily visible.
