These images, taken by New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), show numerous large-scale features on Pluto's surface. The distance to Pluto ranges from 47 million kilometers (about 29 million miles) on June 5 to 31 million kilometers (19 million miles) on June 18. When various large, dark and bright regions appear near limbs, they give Pluto a distinct, but false, non-spherical appearance. Pluto is known to be almost perfectly spherical from previous data. These images are displayed at four times the native LORRI image size, and have been processed using a method called deconvolution, which sharpens the original images to enhance features on Pluto.
Name | Value | Additional Values |
---|---|---|
Target | Pluto | |
System | Pluto | Kuiper Belt |
Target Type | Dwarf Planet | KBO |
Mission | New Horizons | |
Instrument Host | New Horizons | |
Host Type | Flyby Spacecraft | |
Instrument | Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) | |
Detector | ||
Extra Keywords | Color, Visual | |
Acquisition Date | ||
Release Date | 2015-06-22 | |
Date in Caption | ||
Image Credit | NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute | |
Source | photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA19691 | |
Identifier | PIA19691 |