See what it would be like to land on Pluto in this new NASA video
One year ago Thursday, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft gave us our first close-up views of Pluto, when it flew past the dwarf planet in a faraway part of the solar system at a distance of about 7,800 miles.
The data New Horizons collected during the flyby has revolutionized the way scientists understand Pluto.
However, even an unprecedented flyby mission wasn't enough for some of the researchers working on the New Horizons team.
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Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator. has said that he wants to see a lander touch down on the surface of Pluto someday.
Now, thanks to a new video produced by NASA, you can imagine what the views might be like for such a landing mission.
The video makes use of about 100 photos taken over the course of six weeks as New Horizons sped toward Pluto, NASA said.
“Just over a year ago, Pluto was just a dot in the distance,” Stern said in a statement.
“This video shows what it would be like to ride aboard an approaching spacecraft and see Pluto grow to become a world, and then to swoop down over its spectacular terrains as if we were approaching some future landing.”
In the year since New Horizon's flyby, the spacecraft has revealed the tall water-ice mountains of Pluto, the world's blue sunsets and other data suggesting there might be a liquid ocean beneath Pluto's surface, which is fueling some of it's unexpected geology.
Initially, some scientists expected the robotic probe would find Pluto to be a cratered ball of ice, but as the mission got closer to its flyby, images started to reveal that the dwarf planet is exceedingly complex, with a bright, icy heart on perfect display during New Horizons' closest pass.
Scientists back on Earth are still sifting through the images and data collected during the spacecraft's flyby, and more discoveries are sure to come.
But New Horizons is now flying deeper into the Kuiper belt -- the group of icy bodies in Pluto's part of space beyond Neptune -- on its way to meet up with another Kuiper Belt object 1 billion miles from Pluto.
NASA just approved the extended mission to visit the new world, named 2014 MU69, and New Horizons should make its flyby of it on New Year's Day 2019.
Right now, there are no plans for a landing mission. At least not yet...
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Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
