New Horizons shoots short color films of Pluto

Space explorer New Horizons is getting closer and closer to Pluto. Because there is a camera on board, new images are regularly brought to Earth. This time, NASA has made a video showing the dwarf planet with its moon Charon.

NASA has put a number of animations online in gif format. Pluto and Charon can be seen in color and what is striking is that they differ in this respect. Scientists are still arguing about the reason for the color differences. Unfortunately, the images were shot in a very low resolution, so that the contours of the celestial bodies are not visible. One of the images shows how Pluto’s orbit is influenced by Charon’s gravity. That’s because Pluto is a dwarf planet and thus has relatively little mass. The Earth’s moon, for example, has a much smaller influence with its gravity, and is responsible for the tides, among other things.

The images were composed using the Multicolor Visible Imaging Camera onboard New Horizons. It captures colors in red, blue and near infrared. According to NASA, the colors shown in the images are “almost real.”

Since New Horizons will only get closest to Pluto in 24 days, more images and videos are coming. Then the dwarf planet should probably also be a lot better visible. The space explorer was launched more than 9 years ago, so it took almost a decade to reach Pluto, which is at the edge of our solar system.