Psychedelic Pluto – In Beautiful Rainbow Colors Presented By New Horizon Team

| November 16, 2015 | Astronomy | No Comments

MessageToEagle.com – New Horizons scientists present Pluto in beautiful rainbow colors.

This false color image of Pluto was possible to obtain by using a technique called “principal component analysis” to highlight the many subtle color differences between Pluto’s distinct regions of the surface.

"These are big mountains with a large hole in their summit, and on Earth that generally means one thing — a volcano," said Dr Oliver White, a scientist with NASA's Ames Research Centre at Moffett Field, California.
“These are big mountains with a large hole in their summit, and on Earth that generally means one thing — a volcano,” said Dr Oliver White, a scientist with NASA’s Ames Research Centre at Moffett Field, California. Photo credit:  NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

The image data were collected by the spacecraft’s Ralph/MVIC color camera on July 14 at 11:11 AM UTC, from a range of 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers).

Otherwise, we always see the distant Pluto in usual gray, white and cream and copper colors only.

Pluto, the dwarf planet. Credits: NASA
Pluto, the dwarf planet. Credits: NASA

The colorful help us clearly see a variety of different terrains on the dwarf planet, especially two of Pluto’s most distinctive mountains could be cryovolcanoes—ice volcanoes that may have been active in the recent geological past.

See also:

New Horizons Discovers Possible Ice Volcanoes On Pluto

This image was recently presented by Will Grundy of the New Horizons’ surface composition team at the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in National Harbor, Maryland.

MessageToEagle.com

Source: NASA

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