Tag Archives: enhanced

Behold: Pluto, but not as it’s normally seen. To wit:

Colour data and high-resolution images of our Solar System’s most famous dwarf planet, taken by the robotic New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby in 2015 July, have been digitally combined to give an enhanced-colour view of this ancient world sporting an unexpectedly young surface. The featured enhanced color image is not only aesthetically pretty but scientifically useful, making surface regions of differing chemical composition visually distinct. For example, the light-coloured heart-shaped Tombaugh Regio on the lower right is clearly shown here to be divisible into two regions that are geologically different, with the leftmost lobe Sputnik Planitia also appearing unusually smooth. After Pluto, New Horizons continued on, shooting past asteroid Arrokoth in 2019 and has enough speed to escape our Solar System completely.

(Image: NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ./APL, Southwest Research Inst.)

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