New Horizons: NASA Shares ‘Stained Glass’ Image of Pluto for Christmas

The latest image released by NASA on Thursday, shows Pluto being in the holiday spirit.

Though we’re still amazed by New Horizons’ straight-up images of Pluto, it’s easy to forget the probe also captured a mountain of additional data that scientists are still sorting through.

In a statement provided to i4u News, NASA’s New Horizons captured some of the most incredible images of Pluto and its moon Charon over the years. NASA makes Pluto go psychedelic image, each pixel is Christmas colored to the wavelength of light that each pixel.

The aforementioned linear filter lets light with wavelengths as short as 1.25 microns to fall on the image sensor’s one side, and smoothly changes to allow light with lengthy wavelengths of 2.5 microns to fall on the image sensor’s far side. But LEISA has a wedge filter, and this means that different wavelengths are let through at different positions on the filter. If NASA funds an extended mission for the spacecraft, it will arrive at another small world in 2019 after traveling 1 billion miles from Pluto.

TheGuardian report said, You can’t joystick an operation like this from Earth.

According to NASA, the New Horizons team is now analyzing this and other movies to see what else it can learn about the surface of both Pluto and Charon. Then a moment later, it takes another, then another, and so on.

The video, which you can check out below, was recorded by New Horizons’ LEISA infrared imaging spectrometer and has been sped up by approximately 17 times. And, no, stitching together a series of static images of Pluto to make a movie doesn’t count. But how about giving Pluto some Christmas spirit?

The green-and-red theme you see on Pluto is courtesy of New Horizons’ infrared spectrometer, as NASA assigned green and red hues to specific wavelength ranges. The resolution is about 7 kilometers per LEISA pixel. “These new images give us a breathtaking, super-high resolution window into Pluto’s geology”, said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern.