Pluto
appears to be in love. The plucky dwarf planet was demoted from
full-planet status in 2006, but that doesn't seem to have dampened its
good mood. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is closing in on the space
object and a new image highlights a sweet heart on Pluto's surface.
The 1,200-mile-across heart-shaped area of lighter color material stands in contrast to a series of evenly sized dark spots along the equator
seen in earlier images. The heart picture was taken Tuesday from a
distance of 5 million miles away. The probe is moving ever closer and
will soon send back higher-quality images of these intriguing surface
features.
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"The
next time we see this part of Pluto at closest approach, a portion of
this region will be imaged at about 500 times better resolution than we
see today," NASA's Jeff Moore said. "It will be incredible!"
Besides the light heart, a dark area known as "the whale" is visible at the lower left of the dwarf planet.
New
Horizons launched in 2006 on a mission to study Pluto and has been
sending back increasingly clearer images of its target. We've gone from amorphous blobs to pictures showing recognizable landscape features. The "heart" is a good example of this.
New Horizons gave space fans a brief scare earlier in the week when NASA announced some technical difficulties
with the spacecraft. It was out of touch with mission control for over
an hour and ended up switching over to a backup computer.
The
probe recovered from the flaw and is on track to complete its mission
as expected. "The flyby sequence of science observations is officially
under way," NASA notes. The heart image is the first to be sent back to Earth since the technical anomaly happened.
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