We Will Know What Pluto Really Looks Like In 4 Days

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

This image was sent to NASA on July 8th. In about 4 days, NASA tells us their spacecraft should be getting an even better view of Pluto during the "New Horizons’ July 14 closest approach." The image above was taken on July 7, when the NASA spacecraft was just under 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) from Pluto. We are just days away from getting photographs that's 500 times better than the image above.

NASA said the mission started back in 2006 and has published the image as soon as they received it:

After a more than nine-year, three-billion-mile journey to Pluto, it’s showtime for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, as the flyby sequence of science observations is officially underway.

In the early morning hours of July 8, mission scientists received this new view of Pluto—the most detailed yet returned by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard New Horizons. The image was taken on July 7, when the spacecraft was just under 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) from Pluto, and is the first to be received since the July 4 anomaly that sent the spacecraft into safe mode.

This view is centered roughly on the area that will be seen close-up during New Horizons’ July 14 closest approach. This side of Pluto is dominated by three broad regions of varying brightness. Most prominent are an elongated dark feature at the equator, informally known as “the whale,” and a large heart-shaped bright area measuring some 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) across on the right. Above those features is a polar region that is intermediate in brightness.

“The next time we see this part of Pluto at closest approach, a portion of this region will be imaged at about 500 times better resolution than we see today,” said Jeff Moore, Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team leader of NASA’s Ames Research Center. “It will be incredible!”

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

New Horizons was about 3.7 million miles (6 million kilometers) from Pluto and Charon when it snapped this portrait late on July 8, 2015. Most of the bright features around Pluto's edge are a result of image processing, but the bright sliver below the dark "whale," which is also visible in unprocessed images, is real. 

Here's a video explaining Pluto and its moons. It's quite fascinating: