When NASA’s New Horizons flew by Pluto in July, it looked back toward the sun and captured a near-sunset view of the planet’s varied surface. Looking through the details of the images, one can see Pluto’s arctic terrain doesn’t differ much from Earth’s. New Horizons is also proving to be a master of photography.
WHAT NEW HORIZONS SHOWS US
Fifteen minutes after New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, the spacecraft flipped around and its wide-angle Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) snapped a dramatic backlit photo from a distance of 11,000 miles. New Horizons’ images of Pluto reveal a 780-mile range of landscapes, from mountains, 11,000 feet tall, to flat plains, to foggy hazes. The pictures, according to Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator, really make you feel like you’re there, surveying the dwarf planet’s surface.
PLUTO ATMOSPHERE
New Horizons used the oldest trick in photography—capturing light—to beautifully expose Pluto’s hazy atmosphere. The sun created a backlight against Pluto and the foggy atmosphere acted as a natural soft box that scattered the sun’s light over Pluto’s crescent surface. The black-and-white images reveal more than a dozen thin haze layers from near the ground to at least 60 miles above the surface.
“In addition to being visually stunning, these low-lying hazes hint at the weather changing from day to day on Pluto, just like it does here on Earth,” said Will Grundy, lead of the New Horizons Composition team. The origins of these many layers, however, remain a mystery.
RELATING TO EARTH
While Pluto’s hazy horizon is paradoxical, it is similar, in ways, to Earth’s foggy sunrises and sunsets. “If you were standing on the top of one of the mountains rising maybe 1.5 miles above the surrounding terrain, and looked towards the setting (or rising) Sun, you could see ground-hugging hazes like you often see on Earth,” said New Horizon’s team member Alan Howard.
Scientists were surprised by Pluto’s complexity as revealed by New Horizons’ images, but many did not expect the dwarf planet to hold parallel characteristics to Earth. Now, as New Horizons continues its intensive data downlink process, all we can do is wait for new far-out discoveries that will also help us get a better understanding of Earth.
