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Photographs of Pluto taken on 14 July 2015 taken 15 minutes after New Horizon 's closest approach, from a distance of 18,000 kilometers and sent to Earth on 13 September 2015 show a near-sunset on Pluto with details of the surface and a haze in the atmosphere.
On July 14, 2015, at 11:50 UTC, New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto, passing within 12,500 km (7,800 mi) at a speed of 13.78 km/s (49,600 km/h; 30,800 mph), while also coming as close as 28,800 km (17,900 mi) to Charon. Starting 3.2 days prior, the spacecraft mapped Pluto and Charon with 40 km (25 mi) resolution, enabling coverage ...
New Horizons encounters Pluto at a distance of 4.7 billion kilometres, and the communication takes 4 hours 25 minutes to reach Earth. 10 −3: 2.04 × 10 −3 ly: The most distant space probe, Voyager 1, was about 18 light-hours (130 au,19.4 billion km, 12.1 billion mi) away from the Earth as of October 2014. [29]
This maneuver increased the probe's velocity by 4 km/s (14,000 km/h; 9,000 mph), cutting its travel time to Pluto by three years. [3] On February 4, 2015, New Horizons entered the Plutonian system, capturing images of Pluto and its moon Charon from about 203,000,000 km (126,000,000 mi) away.
Scientists have long theorized that Charon formed much like Earth’s moon, which was created after a Mars-size object slammed into our planet. The impact sent molten debris from Earth flying into ...
The distance between Charon and Pluto is about 12,200 miles (19,640 km), compared to the 238,855 miles (384,400 km) on average separating Earth from its moon.
This gives Pluto an escape velocity of 4,363.2 km per hour / 2,711.167 miles per hour (as compared to Earth's 40,270 km per hour / 25,020 miles per hour). Pluto is more than twice the diameter and a dozen times the mass of Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. It is less massive than the dwarf planet Eris, a trans-Neptunian object ...
It is 2,990 km (1,860 mi) long and is the largest dark feature on Pluto. [18] It is the largest of the dark regions ( Brass Knuckles ) that span Pluto's equator. [ 16 ] The dark color of the area is speculated to be the result of a "tar" made of complex hydrocarbons called tholins covering the surface, formed from methane and nitrogen in the ...