Though only two pixels wide, images of Pluto and its largest moon released Wednesday represent a big step forward in getting man's clearest-ever view of the distant dwarf planet.
They were captured by NASA's New Horizons mission, sending a spacecraft on a decade-long journey that will culminate in a close fly-by of Pluto this summer. They depict Pluto and Charon as two bright spots orbiting each other, but with more clarity than past views.
And the picture will only get larger and clearer over the coming months.
"We're just starting to resolve Pluto now," said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. The Laurel institution is running the mission for NASA.
New Horizons captured the images over a week starting Jan. 25. It launched in January 2006, blasting away from Earth at more than 30,000 miles per hour, faster than any spacecraft before it. After being intermittently put into hibernation and awakened for mostly brief observations, it was reawakened for the last time in December as it began its final approach.
Since then, it has moved more than 40 million miles closer but is still more than 120 million miles away from Pluto. By March, it will be the same distance from the dwarf planet as the Earth is from the sun, about 93 million miles, Weaver said.
Scientists at the Hopkins lab will analyze the early images over the coming weeks to consider making any slight changes in the spacecraft's trajectory, he said. They also will study the images further to see if they can learn more about how fast Pluto is rotating, he said.
Those tasks will become easier over the coming months. By July 14, New Horizons will be just 7,700 miles away — close enough to take up more than all of the 1,024-by-1,024-pixel field of view of one of New Horizons' cameras, Weaver said.
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