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Posted on 05/18/2025 1:28:07 PM PDT by MtnClimber
Explanation: What if you could fly over Pluto -- what might you see? The New Horizons spacecraft did just this in 2015 July as it shot past the distant world at a speed of about 80,000 kilometers per hour. Images from this spectacular passage have been color enhanced, vertically scaled, and digitally combined into the featured two-minute time-lapse video. As your journey begins, light dawns on mountains thought to be composed of water ice but colored by frozen nitrogen. Soon, to your right, you see a flat sea of mostly solid nitrogen that has segmented into strange polygons that are thought to have bubbled up from a comparatively warm interior. Craters and ice mountains are common sights below. The video dims and ends over terrain dubbed bladed because it shows 500-meter high ridges separated by kilometer-sized gaps. The robotic New Horizons spacecraft has too much momentum to ever return to Pluto and is now headed out of our Solar System.
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For more detail go to the link and click on the image for a high definition image. You can then move the magnifying glass cursor then click to zoom in and click again to zoom out. When zoomed in you can scan by moving the side bars on the bottom and right side of the image.
Todays image is a video at the source link. The video seems to launch with the music muted so be sure to unmute it is you want the audio. It is a really nice video.
🪐 🌟 🌌 🍔
Todays image is a video at the source link. The video seems to launch with the music muted so be sure to unmute it is you want the audio. It is a really nice video.
Not sure why my cursor is jumping around and over writing text. I am having trouble even typing and correcting this.
That was a pretty amazing video
It is amazing when you consider the precision it takes to pass Pluto at that distance, with exactly the right position, and the right speed to have the orbital dynamics for a flyby like that.
Beautiful. Very impressive.
There was an object of colored something during the flyover.
sure looks round like a planet to me. :)
While it was stripped of its planet status, element #94 is still Plutonium. That element also provided power for the probe.
I once thought that Sky King and Penny were impressive.
I thought I saw Uranus ...
I gotta call BS on this one... according to the stars in the background, the craft changed directions drastically too many times and in too short of period to be “Orbiting”...
Wow, incredible.
Gravitational interaction and trajectory changes did cause the spacecraft to change direction during the Pluto fly by.
As a lifelong fan of interplanetary exploration, I am not only amazed, but also thrilled by this achievement. As a little kid during the JFK years I was excited to imagine such stuff - I even wanted to become an astronaut. I was fortunate enough in later years to work on attitude control systems for Earth-orbit spacecraft. But the interplanetary birds are a leap beyond, and the wonderful data they return just blows my mind.
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