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When the New Horizons spacecraft made its flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015, there was worldwide celebration that we’d finally gotten our first detailed look at this completely new type of planet in the outer reaches of our solar system. But for those of us on the New Horizons science team, that day and those first images were only the beginning.
Since the New Horizons probe flew through the Pluto system on July 14, most of the attention has been on Pluto itself.
NASA scientists are intrigued about a strange feature on Pluto’s largest moon Charon that one member has described as “a large mountain sitting in a moat.”
It doesn’t sound much of a reward for all the effort of designing and building the spacecraft—but for planetary scientists, the data coming back from the mission is pure gold.
Pluto, a celestial oddball, could tell us a lot about the formation of the Solar System. A probe flyby on July 14 will start bringing in the data!
