https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/global-mosaic-of-pluto-in-true-color
Wow! I can’t believe I haven’t had time to write about this yet. We’ve been totally spoilt in the last year or so with images from space haven’t we? However, I have to say that when the very first pixelated Pluto images appeared on the web that I was a little underwhelmed….but I had no idea how good they were due to get (see above). Within weeks the most breathtaking pictures of Pluto and its moons Charon, Hydra and Nix were appearing daily and what beautiful world’s these were turning out to be (OK, so for Hydra and Nix the images are still a little blurry (see below) but I’m not complaining now).
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/new-horizons-captures-two-of-plutos-smaller-moons
More surprising for most of us was the relatively geologically young surface displayed by Pluto – we weren’t expecting this but we weren’t really sure what to expect of this mysterious little world. We’re not re-writing the science books but we’re just simply writing them now – we knew so little about Pluto before these pictures came in. And they say a picture is worth 1000 words, I think in the case of Pluto that a picture is worth many millions of words. But I’ll leave that to the specialists – I’m sure there’s plenty of papers to come from this mission. In the meantime, check out The Planetary Society blogs by Emily Lakdawalla here, here and here etc, she’s covered things really well (as usual). Plus, it’s not all over, there’s data set to be beamed back to Earth for months to come still.
It seems at work that people decided to have a little fun with my comet model that I had made for the Royal Society Summer Exhibition of 2014 (see above). Although I never intended the model to accurately represent 67P – because when we made the model we had no idea what it looked like – instead it was meant to be a generic comet (whatever that is?!)). Anyway, turns out my comet looks more like Pluto now. Oh well, it’s all outer Solar System stuff right?!