NASA's New Horizons succeeded to emerges unscathed from its Pluto flyby adventure. The science returns from the spacecraft's exploration are only just beginning now, that the dwarf planet is behind it.
The New Horizons control center confirmed that the space probe survived its closest approach to Pluto. The flyby passing 12,500 kilometers above the planet's hemisphere may well break a record for a single space mission's number of historic milestones. This is the fastest spacecraft launched to-date, most distant planet in our solar system, last of the first visits to our solar system planets, first trip to the Kuiper Belt, and probably most cancels and revivals.
Pluto was considering a fascinating place even before the New Horizons' exploration. Not, at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, scientists start marveling at the images sent by the spacecraft.
The high-resolution photos of Pluto feature a resolution of four kilometers. The images show the hemisphere of Pluto that faces away from Charon, dark and reddish regions on either side of the planet's equator, a crater dubbed the "whale's blowhole", and many more details revealing the dwarf planet. Photos at even higher-resolution, where taken by the spacee probe, stereo images, along with images of three of Pluto's five moons.
No moons beyond the five already known were discovered in the new Images coming from the spacecraft. Pluto's moons are called Nix, Hydra, Charon, Kerberos, and Styx. The names are inspired from ancient Greek mythology.
High resolution photos coming from the New Horizons space probe confirm the dramatic differences between the grayer, darker, and cratered terrain of the moon Charon and the more dynamic and more varied surface of Pluto. The images also prove Pluto to be very different from Triton, Neptune's moon.
For long, astronomers have considered Triton a model of what Pluto might be, but this theory have been proved untrue by the latest high resolution images coming from the space probe. Pluto is much redder than Triton, resembling in a way with Mars. These red surfaces are presumed to take their color from dark tars made up of hydrocarbons baked by solar radiation.
The Pluto flyby is only the start of NASA's spacecraft mission. The probe will study next the dwarf planet's moonlit night side. NASA's New Horizons' close encounter to the Pluto-Charon system has only just begun to provide scientific returns for researches. The space probe has sent just 24 hours of the first images of its close Pluto flyby, but it is already clear that they are very rich with information.
