Skip to footer

WATCH 'sheer beauty and power' of Pluto unfold in NASA flyover animation

A NASA scientist created a second animation from the hundreds of photos being beamed back by the spacecraft. 

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured hundreds of photos during its flyby of Pluto in mid-July that are still being returned to Earth. The latest batch inspired one NASA scientist to produce an animation that shows what it might be like to take a bird’s eye view tour through Pluto’s thin atmosphere and soar along the path that New Horizons explored.

Stuart Robbins, a research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., has been using New Horizons’ images to map craters across the surfaces of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, in order to better understand the impact of the Kuiper Belt’s many asteroids, comets, and ice chunks striking the dwarf planet and its moon. While mapping craters is his area of research, Dr. Robbins seeks to “convey some of the sheer beauty and power of the features New Horizons is revealing” with his animations. 

The “mosaic” of images that make up the animation, as Robbins terms it, starts with the “heart” of Pluto – informally named Tombaugh Regio – and the surrounding region.

The tour high-flies over Norgay Montes, an icy mountain range that juts 2 miles from the planetary surface, at a height of about 120 miles. The animation then veers north, over Sputnik Planum, an icy plane within the heart, and over Cthulhu Regio, one of Pluto’s darkest areas. The differences in brightness between the vast plane and dark spot are some of the largest natural brightness variations of any object in the solar system, Robbins writes in a blog post for NASA.

The vantage point rises to a height of about 150 miles and turns east, with Pluto’s north pole to the left, the so-called heart the focal point, and older, more cratered areas standing out in marked contrast to the younger glaciers of the “heart’s” left lobe, Sputnik Planum, according to Robbins. The flight rises to a height of more than 1,500 miles above the planet’s surface.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to WATCH 'sheer beauty and power' of Pluto unfold in NASA flyover animation
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0921/WATCH-sheer-beauty-and-power-of-Pluto-unfold-in-NASA-flyover-animation
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe