Have you ever been curious as to what the surface of Pluto looks like? The good news is that if you are curious, like the rest of the world probably, you’re in luck because it seems that New Horizons has managed to capture its highest resolution photos of Pluto to date, in which NASA has compiled them and made a short video of it (see above).
Prior to this, New Horizons did send back some photos of Pluto but it was not the same resolution as the ones we are looking at now. The ones that were sent back were actually taken about 15 minutes before the spacecraft’s closest approach to the planet and they show us a wealth of detail that we’ve probably never seen before.
Of course without actually landing on Pluto itself it’s hard to say what we might be able to expect, but from these highly-detailed photos, it does give us a better idea of what the surface of Pluto looks like. For example prior to this we knew that there were mountain ranges in Pluto, but the photos now reveal actual individual mountains.
New Horizons has actually flown by Pluto already but due to the speed of data transfer which is about 1-4 kilobits per second, it will undoubtedly take a while before the data on the spacecraft manages to reach Earth.
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