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New Horizons captured its first (distant) images of Pluto in late September 2006, during a test of the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager. [24] The images, taken from a distance of approximately 4.2 billion kilometers, confirmed the spacecraft's ability to track distant targets, critical for maneuvering toward Pluto and other Kuiper belt objects.
Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume, by a small margin, but is less massive than Eris.
These were the closest images taken of a Kuiper belt object besides Pluto and Arrokoth as of February 2018. [ 192 ] [ 193 ] The dwarf planet Haumea was observed from afar by the New Horizons spacecraft in October 2007, January 2017, and May 2020, from distances of 49 AU, 59 AU, and 63 AU, respectively.
NASA launched the New Horizon spacecraft in 2006 to learn more about the icy dwarf planet Pluto. Here are some of the first photos from that mission, taken from between 125 and 115 million miles away.
In 2017 it was only 2.7 AU from Pluto. [14] Before 486958 Arrokoth was discovered in 2014, Arawn was the best known target for a flyby by the New Horizons spacecraft after its Pluto flyby in 2015. [15] [16] Arawn was one of the first objects targeted for distant observations by New Horizons, which were taken on 2 November 2015. [17]
NASA's New Horizons probe has returned the first color images of Pluto. The small blurry dots in the newly-released photo are Pluto and Charon, the largest of Pluto's moons. New Horizons captured ...
The following is a list of Solar System objects by orbit, ordered by increasing distance from the Sun. Most named objects in this list have a diameter of 500 km or more. The Sun, a spectral class G2V main-sequence star; The inner Solar System and the terrestrial planets. 2021 PH27; Mercury. Mercury-crossing minor planets; Venus. Venus-crossing ...
Observations by the James Webb Space Telescope are giving scientists a fuller understanding about the composition and evolution of Pluto's moon Charon, the largest moon orbiting any of our solar ...