Pluto photos from New Horizons reveal 'complex, interesting world' - fox6now.com
LAUREL, Maryland — NASA on Wednesday revealed new images from the New Horizons spacecraft that flew by Pluto one day earlier. The images the craft took and transmitted back to Earth are from the closest point the probe came to the dwarf planet as it made its milestone in space exploration history. With Wednesday’s photos, New Horizons is also sending a banquet of knowledge to scientists. That sounds like a long time, but not so long compared with the 4. 56-billion-year age of the solar system. The Pluto mission completes the reconnaissance of the classical solar system, and it makes the United States the first nation to send a space probe to every planet from Mercury to Pluto. The flyby came 50 years after the Mariner 4 probe accomplished the first flyby of Mars, which sent back the first photos of another planet taken close up from space. In the weeks that New Horizons was homing in on Pluto, NASA and its partner, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, published a barrage of images. “Pluto New Horizons is a true mission of exploration showing us why basic scientific research is so important,” said John Grunsfeld, a NASA associate administrator. Source: fox6now.com
