                        Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
      fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
                    written by a professional astronomer.

                                 2025 May 18

                       Pluto Flyover from New Horizons
   Video Credit: NASA, JHUAPL, SwRI, P. Schenk & J. Blackwell (LPI); Music
                   Open Sea Morning by Puddle of Infinity

   Explanation: What if you could fly over Pluto -- what might you see?
   The New Horizons spacecraft did just this in 2015 July as it shot past
   the distant world at a speed of about 80,000 kilometers per hour.
   Images from this spectacular passage have been color enhanced,
   vertically scaled, and digitally combined into the featured two-minute
   time-lapse video. As your journey begins, light dawns on mountains
   thought to be composed of water ice but colored by frozen nitrogen.
   Soon, to your right, you see a flat sea of mostly solid nitrogen that
   has segmented into strange polygons that are thought to have bubbled up
   from a comparatively warm interior. Craters and ice mountains are
   common sights below. The video dims and ends over terrain dubbed bladed
   because it shows 500-meter high ridges separated by kilometer-sized
   gaps. The robotic New Horizons spacecraft has too much momentum to ever
   return to Pluto and is now headed out of our Solar System.

                       Tomorrow's picture: moon Charon
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       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
            NASA Official: Amber Straughn Specific rights apply.
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                      A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC,
                           NASA Science Activation
                             & Michigan Tech. U.

