On This Day in Space! July 14, 2015: New Horizons spacecraft flies by Pluto, ,
On July 14, 2015, a spacecraft flew by Pluto for the first time! NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft spent 9.5 years making the 3-billion-mile journey to Pluto.
When it finally arrived, it took some amazing photos of the dwarf planet’s surface. Most notably, the photos revealed that Pluto has a huge, heart-shaped plain, tall mountains and icy volcanoes.
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Pluto’s famous “heart,” as seen by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its 2015 flyby of the dwarf planet. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)The mission also found that Pluto and its largest moon Charon are tidally locked, which means that Pluto’s heart is always facing Charon, and the same side of Charon is always facing Pluto. It also seems to be borrowing some atmosphere from Pluto, which appears as a big red spot on Charon’s north pole.
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