Early results from New Horizons’ rendezvous with Pluto

Enlarge / The dwarf planet Pluto (colors enhanced to show differences). (credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

When the New Horizons spacecraft sent back its first images of Pluto in July, the view was glorious and extraordinary. It’s not every day that we get to see a (dwarf) planet up close for the first time. As planetary scientists scrambled to put the pieces of their blown minds back together, we got some initial observations and hypotheses about Pluto’s surprising surface. But the bulk of the data from New Horizons’ brief encounter had yet to be transmitted back to Earth. As that data continues to stream in, more detailed science is being done.

This week in Science, a stack of five papers lays the foundation for that science by describing Pluto’s geology and atmosphere, as well as that of Charon and the smaller satellites orbiting the dwarf planet with the big heart.

That includes a basic description of the Plutonian landscape—at least the hemisphere that greeted the New Horizons spacecraft on approach. The lower quality data from the other side will eventually be analyzed as well.

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