Pluto Looks Like Miniature Earth

It is seldom the US space agency uses strong words, but the picture elicited feelings.

In the tweet from NASA there are two images, but one is a section of the second. Read also: Has photographed a heart in the room Also read: New Horizons passes Pluto The landscape on Pluto is captured with a camera that offers high resolution. It is the first time images from this camera is made ​​public, writes Emily Lakdawalla in The Planetary Society.

Image in full resolution you can see here.

Craggy mountains

Blogs, geologist, space scientist, and by his own words: planetary evangelist, Emily Lakdawalla, writes in his blog that there is so much detail in the image that it is almost impossible to describe. – Just look, look, look at all the details, writes Lakdawalla.

– Look at the jagged mountains and how they throw shadows at sunset. How mountains looks relative to the planet. You will never see such a thing on earth because the earth is so much bigger than their mountain, even the moon is so hilly that Pluto.

Alan Stern is responsible scientist probe New Horizons who took the picture during nærpasseringen of dwarf planet on July 14 this year.He will also use big words in the description of the picture. – It makes you feel like you are there. That you’re on Pluto and you can use your own eyes to see the landscape, said Stern at a press conference. – But the picture is also a discovery for researchers. It reveals new details about the atmosphere, mountains, glaciers and plains, said Stern.

As Antarctica

There are glaciers and the ice-covered plains that gets many astronomers to compare Pluto with Antarctica. There are weather on Pluto which is also similar to the weather in Antarctica. In the image it is possible to see the haze that operates over the landscape. – Disen gives us clues about the weather changes from day to day, just like on Earth, said astronomer Will Grundy at the press conference.

The weather is not based on the same as the weather here with us. Pluto is extremely cold and there is no liquid water or air in the normal sense. – The picture suggests that there is a cycle of time that has frozen with nitrogen to make, said Grundy.

Much more to come

The image is not the last we’ll see of Pluto. There are many shots left that have not yet been sent. They are stored in the probe. New Horizons is so far away from Earth that it is not possible with a broadband connection. Rather narrowband. A kilobytes per second is the speed. The spacecraft will spend 16 months to send home information it has stored.