[meteorite-list] Pluto's Close-up, Now in Color

[Ron Baalke]

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Science-Photos/image.php?gallery_id=2&image_id=389

Pluto's Close-up, Now in Color
Release Date: December 10, 2015
Keywords: LORRI, MVIC, Pluto, Ralph

This enhanced color mosaic combines some of the sharpest views of Pluto 
that NASA's New Horizons spacecraft obtained during its July 14 flyby. 
The pictures are part of a sequence taken near New Horizons' closest approach 
to Pluto, with resolutions of about 250-280 feet (77-85 meters) per pixel 
- revealing features smaller than half a city block on Pluto's surface. 
Lower resolution color data (at about 2,066 feet, or 630 meters, per pixel) 
were added to create this new image.

The images form a strip 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide, trending (top to 
bottom) from the edge of 'badlands" northwest of the informally named 
Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi mountains, onto the shoreline of 
Pluto's "heart" feature, and just into its icy plains. They combine pictures 
from the telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) taken approximately 
15 minutes before New Horizons' closest approach to Pluto, with - from 
a range of only 10,000 miles (17,000 kilometers) - with color data (in 
near-infrared, red and blue) gathered by the Ralph/Multispectral Visible 
Imaging Camera (MVIC) 25 minutes before the LORRI pictures. 

The wide variety of cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains seen here 
gives scientists and the public alike a breathtaking, super-high-resolution 
color window into Pluto's geology. 

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest 
Research Institute