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> The New Horizons spacecraft near Pluto
The New Horizons spacecraft near Pluto
author: Walter B. Myers/Novapix
reference: e-son40-00008
Image Size 300 DPI: 59 * 42 cm
NASA’s New Horizons unmanned spacecraft over dwarf planet Pluto and its moon Charon. New Horizons has been en route to Pluto since its launch from Earth in 2006 and is scheduled to make its closest approach on 14 July 2015.
New Horizons is about the size and shape of a grand piano and weighed 1,054 pounds at launch. The high-gain dish antenna is about 7 feet in diameter and is employed for communication with the Earth.
In this image the New Horizons spacecraft is about 10,000 miles from Pluto (upper right), 22,000 miles from its largest moon Charon (upper left) and 2.97 billion miles from the Earth. Dominating this side of the spacecraft with an 8 inch aperture is the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), a digital camera with a large telephoto telescope fortified to operate in the cold, hostile environs of deep space. At 90 days before closest approach to Pluto, LORRI's images will surpass the quality of the best Hubble Space Telescope images of Pluto.
While little is known about Pluto's appearance, here this Kuiper belt dwarf planet is realized as a frozen world covered with various ices, hosting a thin atmosphere of nitrogen, methane and other hydrocarbons too possibly, with a significantly weathered surface as Pluto's 248-year orbit alternately brings it closer then further from the warmth of the sun.
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