Reuters — NASA has brought Pluto into focus for earth dwellers with a stop-motion video of over 100 colour images taken by the agency’s New Horizons spacecraft.
The photographs showing the approach to the dwarf planet were released on January 19 and were taken over six weeks in the summer of 2015.
The New Horizons spacecraft flew for more than nine years and three billion miles to visit the Pluto system.
“The challenge in creating this movie is to make it feel like you’re diving into Pluto. We had to interpolate some of the frames based on we know Pluto looks like to make it as smooth and seamless as possible. It’s certainly fun to see this and think what it would feel like to approach a landing on Pluto,” said Constantine Tsang, a New Horizons scientist at SwRI (Southwest Research Institute) who helped create the film, in a NASA press release.
Pluto was discovered in 1930 and reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. It orbits the sun like other planets, but is smaller. Pluto is more than 3.6 billion miles (5.8 billion kilometres) away from the sun, about 40 times as far from the sun as Earth is.
The planet is 1,400 miles (2,300 kilometres) wide and its diameter is about 2/3 of Earth’s moon’s diameter.