The Most Detailed Photo of Pluto You’ll See ‘for a Very Long Time’

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10 months after its historic Pluto fly-by, the New Horizons spacecraft has finally finished sending back “the most detailed photos of Pluto’s terrain you’ll see for a very long time,” according to NASA.

The strip mosaic is made up of close-up, black-and-white shots of the dwarf planet’s surface that covers the whole hemisphere New Horizons saw as it flew by in July—from a rugged mountain range through a stretch of bright, nitrogen ice plains. The final mosaic includes all of the highest-resolution images taken by New Horizons.

You can see the full image here, or click play on the video below to get a tour of the whole thing from top to bottom:

The final mosaic boasts a resolution of about 260 feet per pixel, with each image captured by the spacecraft’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) camera from a distance of about 9,850 miles (15,850 kilometers) from Pluto.

To learn more about this image and what it took to capture it, click here.

(via Engadget)


Image creditsPhotos courtesy of NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.

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