NASA New Horizons: Pluto Aerial Tour

NASA has recently released its newest images of Pluto, after receiving images from the New Horizons spacecraft. These images have given scientists the best look at Pluto in the history of astronomy.

"The spacecraft is now sending back lots of image and composition data; over the past two weeks, New Horizons has returned to Earth dozens of images at up to 400 meters per pixel of the flyby hemisphere, and this has given scientists and the public an unprecedented view of this mysterious world," according to Staurt Robbins, a research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Now, Robbins has taken the images and used them to map the craters across Pluto's surface, and then used this data to create and release a video allowing people to take an "aerial" tour of Pluto.

The animation takes viewers 120 miles off Pluto's surface and zooms out to more than 1,500 miles away. This proximity is provided by New Horizons' telescopic camera, as the probe itself did not actually get so close; New Horizons zoomed past the dwarf planet at a minimum distance of 7,800 miles on July 14, according to Robbins.

"I primarily use these images to map craters across the surfaces of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, to understand the population of impactors from the Kuiper Belt striking Pluto and Charon," Robbins wrote in a blog post.

New Horizons began beaming home the vast majority of the images and data collected during the close encounter with Pluto earlier this month. 

Mission team members said that the relay work will take about a year to complete, giving space lovers plenty of time to expect a constant influx of information, according to Space. 

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