Pluto Flyover from New Horizons
Video Credit:
NASA,
JHUAPL,
SwRI,
P. Schenk & J. Blackwell
(LPI);
Music Open Sea Morning by Puddle of Infinity
What if you could fly over
Pluto -- what might you see?
The New Horizons spacecraft did just this in
2015 July
as it shot past the distant world at a speed of about 80,000 kilometers per hour.
Images from this spectacular passage have been
color enhanced, vertically scaled, and digitally combined into the
featured two-minute time-lapse video.
As your journey begins, light dawns on
mountains
thought to be composed of water ice but colored by frozen nitrogen.
Soon, to your right, you see a
flat sea of mostly
solid nitrogen
that has segmented into strange polygons that are thought to have
bubbled up
from a comparatively warm
interior.
Craters and ice mountains are common sights below.
The video
dims and ends over terrain dubbed
bladed because it shows
500-meter high ridges separated by kilometer-sized gaps.
The robotic New Horizons spacecraft has too much
momentum to ever return to
Pluto
and is now
headed out of our
Solar System.