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Bruce Murray Space Image Library

Pluto’s close-up, now in color

Pluto’s close-up, now in color
Pluto’s close-up, now in color

This enhanced color mosaic combines some of the sharpest views of Pluto that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft obtained during its July 14, 2015 flyby. The pictures are part of a sequence taken near New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, with resolutions of about 77-85 meters per pixel – revealing features smaller than half a city block on Pluto’s surface. Lower resolution color data (at about 630 meters, per pixel) were added to create this new image.

The images form a strip 80 kilometers wide, trending (top to bottom) from the edge of “badlands” northwest of the informally named Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi mountains, onto the shoreline of Pluto’s “heart” feature, and just into its icy plains. They combine pictures from the telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) taken approximately 15 minutes before New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, with – from a range of only 17,000 kilometers – with color data (in near-infrared, red and blue) gathered by the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) 25 minutes before the LORRI pictures.

NASA / JHUAPL /SwRI