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Get Ready for More Pluto Pics from New Horizons
One of the last images sent by New Horizons since its flyby, but that’s about to change. Here, backlit by the sun, Pluto’s atmosphere rings its silhouette like a luminous halo in this image taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft around midnight EDT on July 15. This global portrait of the atmosphere was captured when the spacecraft was about 1.25 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Pluto and shows structures as small as 12 miles across. The image, delivered to Earth on July 23, is displayed with north at the top of the frame. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
If you thought the New Horizons spacecraft flyby of the Pluto system happened waaaay too fast and you’re pining for more images and data, you are in luck. What the spacecraft has been able to send back so far is just the tip of the icy dwarf planet, so to speak.
Starting tomorrow, Saturday, September 5, 2015, the spacecraft will begin an “intensive” downlink session that will last for a year or more, sending back the tens of gigabits of data the spacecraft collected and stored on its digital recorders during the flyby. What will come first are “selected high priority” data-sets that the science team has been anxiously waiting for.
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Read the rest of Get Ready for More Pluto Pics from New Horizons (847 words)
© nancy for Universe Today, 2015. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: Deep Space Network, New Horizons, Pluto
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Source: http://www.universetoday.com/122179/get-ready-for-more-pluto-pics-from-new-horizons/
