A mission managed in Maryland that is speeding its way toward Pluto captured the first color image of the dwarf planet.
The image shows the former planet glowing yellow, with its largest moon, Charon, also giving off yellowish light. Officials at NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory posted the image online Tuesday.
Here is their caption:
This image of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, was taken by the Ralph color imager aboard NASA's New Horizons spacecraft on April 9 and downlinked to Earth the following day. It is the first color image ever made of the Pluto system by a spacecraft on approach. The image is a preliminary reconstruction, which will be refined later by the New Horizons science team. Clearly visible are both Pluto and the Texas-sized Charon. The image was made from a distance of about 71 million miles (115 million kilometers)-roughly the distance from the Sun to Venus. At this distance, neither Pluto nor Charon is well resolved by the color imager, but their distinctly different appearances can be seen. As New Horizons approaches its flyby of Pluto on July 14, it will deliver color images that eventually show surface features as small as a few miles across.
New Horizons launched in 2006 and blasted away from Earth faster than any spacecraft before it. Still, it has taken more than 9 years for it to get anywhere close to Pluto.
It is expected to make increasingly detailed observations of the dwarf planet as it approaches its closest fly-by of Pluto on July 14, at a distance of less than 8,000 miles.