Watch: Another Pluto flyby courtesy of NASA and New Horizons
Hey! It’s another goddamn glorious flyby of Pluto, courtesy of the SpaceCzars at NASA and the New Horizons spacecraft.
NASA has released some truly stunning images of Pluto since it began the year-long download of the rest of New Horizons’ data. Now the agency has taken some of those images and made a new virtual flyover of the dwarf planet, and the results are pretty spectacular.
The video was made with images that were released last Friday, all of which were taken by New Horizons’ LORRI (Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) camera. It starts low, just above the mountains that the New Horizons team calls the Norgay Montes region, then heads north to the icy plains of the Sputnik Planum and black craters of the Cthulhu Regio. (These names were picked by the New Horizons team, and while they are unofficial, it hasn’t stopped NASA from regularly using them.) And because New Horizons is now sending back uncompressed images, the video is much higher resolution than the last flyover video that NASA released.
Just a few months ago, our best images of Pluto were a blurry mess. Now, we’re seeing the dwarf planet in unprecedented detail, and the view keeps getting better and better.