Pluto surface look like a scene painted on stain glass.
Celebrating Christmas can be great: family, presents, Christmas trees, Santa and the whole shebang. But have you ever thought about what’s it like to celebrate Christmas in space? Come on, come all to our outer space get-together. We have asteroids, meteors, comets and even Pluto has its own Christmas Theme.
Actually, no one planned to throw a Chrismas party on Pluto. But the dwarf planet does have some nice colors to it, making thing scene look like a scene painted on stained glass.
The picture in question was relayed back to NASA HQ on the 14th of July, at around 9:40 a.m by New Horizon. At that time, the New Horizon spacecraft was just 67000 miles aways from Pluto and manage to take some stunning snaps of the dwarf’s icy surface.
Stained in blue and purple, the picture doesn’t depict how Pluto actually looks like. In fact, the areas marked with different color represent certain points of interest for the scientists on Earth. By using New Horizon’s high-tech sensors, the researchers have been able to learn more about Pluto’s surface.
The color gradient represents different types of molecules which scientists identified on the surface of the dwarf planet.
And if it’s Christmas on Earth, let it be Christmas everywhere, including in space. It doesn’t matter that Pluto has a grayish look, with a touch of color and some imaging sensors, anyone can work magic.
Meanwhile, the bold unmanned space explorer will continue its journey to explore deep space. We are uncertain if New Horizon will take a respite and glide around Pluto some more. What we do know is that New Horizon is scheduled to explore another small world, located at the verge of our Solar System.
If everything checks out ok and NASA decides to divert additional funds to the New Horizon space exploration program than the probe will venture forward into the unknown. According to their projection, the unmanned shuttlecraft will enter a standard orbit with the other planet at the end on 2019, after traveling one billion miles away from Pluto.
In the meantime, until the board decides what to do with the dauntless space journeyman, New Horizon will continue to send endless streams of data on Pluto. And it takes quite a while for the data packages to reach Earth (approximately one year).
Pluto has its own Christmas theme and New Horizon is scheduled to further deeper into space. We are looking forward to hearing great news from the bold explorer from the verges of our Solar System.
Photo credits:www.wikipedia.org
