NASA released Saturday two movies made from images captured by the New Horizons spacecraft depicting Pluto and Charon, the planet's largest moon, in orbit.
On July 14, New Horizons will be flying its closest to Pluto, approaching around 7,800 miles from the planet's surface. It's the first ever mission to the planet as well as the Kuiper Belt, a remnant beyond Neptune from when the solar system was formed. By going on a journey nearly 3 million miles long in distance, New Horizons aims to provide scientists with basic answers to questions about the moons, atmospheres and surface properties of Pluto's system.
The near true-color movies were made by assembling images taken in three colors (near-infrared, red and blue) by a Multicolor Visible Imaging Camera on the spacecraft between May 29 and June 3.
"It's exciting to see Pluto and Charon in motion and in color," said Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizons from the Southwest Research Institute. He added that even at low resolution, it was possible to see that Pluto and its largest moon differ in colors.
The two movies were made using the same sets of images but they take on different perspectives to display Pluto and Charon, with one "Pluto-centric" and the other barycentric.
In the Pluto-centric movie, Charon is shown moving in relation to the planet, which is at the center and its North Pole at the top. Pluto takes the same amount of time to turn around its axis as it takes Charon to orbit around the planet: 6 days, 9 hours and 17.6 minutes. Though pixelated, the movie shows regular shifts in brightness as darker and brighter terrains appear on different faces.
With the second movie barycentric, it shows Pluto and Charon moving around the center of gravity the two share. But since Puto has more mass than Charon, their barycenter is located closer to the planet than to the moon.
Cathy Olkin, deputy project scientist for the New Horizons from the SwRI, said color observations are expected to get better as the spacecraft gets closer to Pluto. When the New Horizons gets close to the planet and its largest moon, it will be able to resolve the surfaces of Pluto and Charon at scales of just miles, providing the closest look possible of the planet and the moon's surfaces and the manner by which volatile compounds move around over these surfaces.
