New
Horizons a NASA spacecraft which, after
a 4.9 billion and 9 1/2-year long journey in space, flew by Pluto. It
is the first time a human-made object has ever been that close to the
dwarf planet.
The
craft flew by the distant “dwarf” planet yesterday after reaching a
region beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt, which was discovered in
1992. The achievement is the culmination of a 50-year effort to
explore the solar system.
New
Horizons released new pictures of the planet in
unprecedented quality.
The
craft doesn’t carry the propellant needed to fire braking rockets
that would trim its speed so it could slip into orbit. Its cameras
and science instruments must work on the fly.“This
stunning image of the dwarf planet was captured from New Horizons at
about 4pm EDT on July 13, about 16 hours before the moment
of closest approach,“Nasa wrote to describe the picture on
Instagram. “The spacecraft was 476,000 miles (766,000 kilometers)
from the surface.” Once snapped, the picture’s data, travelling
at the speed of light, took 4.5 hours to get back to Nasa’s
computers.
Below,
you can see the progress in photographing the distant planet over the
year.
Since
New Horizons took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida in January 2006,
Pluto was demoted from planet to dwarf planet, and two
of its five moons, Kerberos and Styx, have been discovered .
Despite
Pluto’s demotion, some still consider it a planet and have gathered
the most recent pictures of all the solar system’s planetes for a
spatial “family picture”.
Reuters
Reuters
