Fly With New Horizons During Stunning Pluto Encounter

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made history when it zipped past Pluto and its system of moons during a hair-raising encounter on July 14, coming within 7,800 miles of the dwarf planet’s surface.

Now, the mission team has stitched together the observations made by the probe during its historic flyby, creating a stunning high-resolution view of what it looks like to barrel through the Kuiper Belt at 31,000 miles per hour:

Captured in the video is the long approach to Pluto and its moons, the wonderful high-resolution global view of Pluto during closest approach, and then the ring of scattered sunlight as Pluto blocks the sun from view as a stunning eclipse.

As discussed by research scientist Stuart Robbins, at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who created this flyby video, to make the animation more cinematically appealing, he had to tweak the timescale between frames.

“The final product goes from one second of movie time equaling 30 hours at the beginning and end, to one second of movie time equaling 30 minutes for the closest-approach section,” writes Robbins in a blog post. The approach to Pluto occurred over a long period, whereas the point of close approach was gone in a flash, so Robbins basically hit the slow-mo button when New Horizons buzzed the dwarf plant’s surface, but sped up the footage when the spacecraft was far away.

Read more at Discovery News