itsfullofstars: NASA’s New Horizons sent back the best photos...

itsfullofstars:

NASA’s New Horizons sent back the best photos of Pluto ever.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has sent back the first in a series of the sharpest views of Pluto it obtained during its July flyby – and the best close-ups of Pluto that humans may see for decades.

Each week the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft transmits data stored on its digital recorders from its flight through the Pluto system on July 14. These latest 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 less than half the size of a city block on Pluto’s diverse surface.  In these new images, New Horizons captured a wide variety of cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains.

Now what are we going to do with this data?

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propagandery: There Is Red Water on Pluto It’s ice. But it’s...

propagandery:

There Is Red Water on Pluto

It’s ice. But it’s water ice. And it’s red.

NASA’s New Horizons probe keeps teaching us crazy things about Pluto, which as recently as earlier this year looked like a tiny speck in the best photos we had of it. Most recent discovery: Pluto has a blue sky and red water.

“New Horizons has detected numerous small, exposed regions of water ice on Pluto,” NASA noted in the press release. NASA doesn’t know yet why water appears on some regions of Pluto and not others, but it notes that Pluto’s watery regions are a deep red color.

“I’m surprised that this water ice is so red,” Silvia Protopapa, New Horizons scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Could this be mined and used? Would that be worth it?

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