As New Horizons bears down on Pluto, its images just get sharper and sharper.
The probe’s latest picture released yesterday has started to give scientists some real indications of the geology on the dwarf world.
The new black-and-white view reveals a vast band of patterned terrain stretching around the globe for roughly 1,500km.
Nasa’s spacecraft is due to flyby the distant mini-planet on Tuesday. When it does so, it will be just 12,500km above the surface. At that point, its telescopic camera, Lorri, will be acquiring images at a resolution that is better than 100m per pixel.
But for the moment, features still have a rather blurred look about them. This latest shot from Lorri was taken on Thursday when New Horizons was still 5.4 million km away. At this distance, the resolution is 27km per pixel.
New Horizons was launched from Earth in 2006. It is set to gather hundreds of pictures and other types of research data as it sweeps past Pluto and its five moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra.
The probe’s difficulty is getting all that information back to Earth. The distance to the dwarf is vast - more than 4.7 billion km - and this makes for very low bit rates.
