PIA19691: Features on the Close Approach Hemisphere


Features on the Close Approach Hemisphere

Caption:

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.

Cataloging Keywords:

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