14 DAY TRIAL // NASA's New Horizons probe launched in January 2006 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Now, nearly a decade after its departure, the spacecraft is just days away from completing its mission: reaching the Pluto system and imaging the dwarf planet and its moons in unprecedented detail.
New Horizons' flyby of the Pluto system is scheduled for July 14 and will bring the spacecraft within merely 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) of the orb. “It will be incredible,” promises NASA scientist Jeff Moore.
While waiting for its upcoming close encounter with Pluto and its satellites, the NASA probe keeps itself entertained imaging the dwarf planet from afar. Earlier this week, on Tuesday, it managed to obtain yet another stunningly detailed view of its target celestial body.
The image, available below, was taken from a distance of 5 million miles (about 8 million kilometers) and shows several rather intriguing features noticeable on the surface of Pluto.
Lo and behold, Pluto has a heart
This latest view of Pluto delivered by the New Horizons spacecraft shows a big and oddly bright heart-shaped feature on the surface of the dwarf planet. Scientists estimate this cosmic heart to measure somewhere around 1,200 miles (3,000 kilometers) across.
Next to this heart of Pluto sits a darker area that NASA astronomers say kind of, sort of resembles the silhouette of a whale. They are so convinced of this similarity that they've even nicknamed this region on the orb's surface “the whale.”
“Most prominent are an elongated dark feature at the equator, informally known as ‘the whale,’ and a large heart-shaped bright area measuring some 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) across on the right,” mission scientists wrote in a statement.
Its flyby of the Pluto system on July 14 will see the New Horizons probe fly over the dwarf planet's peculiar whale- and heart-shaped features. This upcoming historic flight will allow the spacecraft to image the two regions at about 500 times better resolution than in the view obtained this past Tuesday.
