My birthday isn’t until Friday. But I got an early present from NASA today (yesterday, as you read this). We’ve been waiting years for the New Horizons probe to reach the Pluto system and on July 14th, the waiting was over. We’ve made no secret about our giddiness here at The Lab. And we’ve talked a whole bunch about this mission on the Mad Art Cast podcast. But here we are. Let’s bask in this historic time together with some Pluto-centric Quickies. Forth!
Our pal Glendon Mellow has a roundup of art that has been inspired by Pluto and the New Horizons mission on Symbiartic at the Scientific American blog network. You may notice that our Chief, Surly Amy, is featured!
We should have expected this – Randall Munroe of xkcd has gone ahead and helpfully labelled the areas revealed by the most recent (as of Tuesday night) picture of Pluto. Seems accurate to me.
Here’s a really helpful explanation of how and why the data transfer from New Horizons to Earth is so slow.
Phil Plait shows us a really cool picture of Pluto that was taken thru the haze of a comet’s tail.
These new false color images of Pluto and Charon highlight the differences in the compositions of their respective surfaces. They’re also eerily beautiful.
Here’s a visual history of Pluto observation, from Clyde Tombaugh, to the Hubble telescope, to New Horizons, in GIF form!
Images of Pluto via NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI
