The pictures were taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft
Laurel:
With fanfare, NASA released the first batch of mesmerizing close-up images of Pluto and its moons on Wednesday, a day after the New Horizons spacecraft shot past it in a sprint to gather data about the former ninth planet.
It turns out that icy mountains up to 11,000 feet tall - comparable to the height of the Rockies - cast shadows on at least part of Pluto's surface, which appeared to be generally unmarred by the kinds of craters seen on our moon and other planets. Based on these clues, the mission scientists gauged that the surface of Pluto is less than 100 million years old.
These images were the product of a mission that has taken more than nine years and traveled 3 billion miles.
Celebrating the flyby on Tuesday night, the mission team held up a large poster of a stamp that the U.S. Postal Service issued in 1991: "Pluto Not Yet Explored."
Back then, Pluto was still regarded as a planet, but one that astronomers knew little about.
On Tuesday night, New Horizons had just checked in after nearly a day of uninterrupted scientific observations of Pluto and its moons.
On the poster, the words "Not" and "Yet" were crossed out.
"We have completed the initial reconnaissance of the solar system," said S. Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator.
John M. Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for the science mission directorate, said, "This is truly a hallmark in human history."
More than capturing a close-up of Pluto, the mission is opening the door to a new neighborhood of the solar system that is bigger and stranger than the solar system that astronomers thought they had catalogued by the 1990s and the roster of planets memorized by schoolchildren that ended with an oddball iceball named Pluto.
It turns out that icy mountains up to 11,000 feet tall - comparable to the height of the Rockies - cast shadows on at least part of Pluto's surface, which appeared to be generally unmarred by the kinds of craters seen on our moon and other planets. Based on these clues, the mission scientists gauged that the surface of Pluto is less than 100 million years old.
These images were the product of a mission that has taken more than nine years and traveled 3 billion miles.
Celebrating the flyby on Tuesday night, the mission team held up a large poster of a stamp that the U.S. Postal Service issued in 1991: "Pluto Not Yet Explored."
Back then, Pluto was still regarded as a planet, but one that astronomers knew little about.
On Tuesday night, New Horizons had just checked in after nearly a day of uninterrupted scientific observations of Pluto and its moons.
On the poster, the words "Not" and "Yet" were crossed out.
"We have completed the initial reconnaissance of the solar system," said S. Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator.
John M. Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for the science mission directorate, said, "This is truly a hallmark in human history."
More than capturing a close-up of Pluto, the mission is opening the door to a new neighborhood of the solar system that is bigger and stranger than the solar system that astronomers thought they had catalogued by the 1990s and the roster of planets memorized by schoolchildren that ended with an oddball iceball named Pluto.
© 2015, The New York Times News Service
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