NASA has released a new video letting viewers experience landing on the surface of Pluto. The colorful video has been created using 100 images obtained from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its close flyby of Pluto in July 2015. The team at NASA used these shots from onboard cameras to create the clip.
The video titled ‘A Colourful Landing on Pluto’, first shows a distant view of Pluto, its largest moon, Charon, and then proceeds to reveal “an eventual ride in for a ‘landing’ on the shoreline of Pluto’s informally named Sputnik Planitia”.
The team at NASA superimposed low-resolution color from the Ralph color camera aboard New Horizons on the frames to create best color simulation of a descent from high altitude to surface of dwarf planet.
“To create a movie that makes viewers feel as if they’re diving into Pluto, mission scientists had to interpolate some of the panchromatic (black and white) frames based on what they know Pluto looks like to make it as smooth and seamless as possible,” NASA explained.
NASA also released a Pluto’s detailed color map based on a series of three color filter images.
New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe that was launched with a primary mission to perform a flyby study of the Pluto system. The secondary mission of this spacecraft was to fly by and examine one or more objects in the Kuiper belt. The probe was engineered by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), under the guidance of S. Alan Stern.
New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It was launched directly into an Earth-and-solar escape trajectory. The spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter on February 28, 2007, flying at a distance of 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers).
The gravity assist received from Jupiter flyby increased New Horizons’ speed. After passing Jupiter, the probe went in hibernation mode to preserve on-board systems. New Horizons was brought back online mode on December 6, 2014 for the instrument check for Pluto encounter. On July 14, 2015, the spacecraft was flying about 7,800 miles (12,500 km) above the surface of Pluto. After completing it flyby of Pluto, New Horizons moved ahead for a flyby of Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69. This encounter is expected to take place on January 1, 2019.
In December 2015, NASA released the first high-resolution image of Pluto captured by New Horizon. The spacecraft captured these pictures during its closest flyby of July 2015.
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