The Complete Story of the Pluto Flyby in 12 NASA Visuals

Today we watched the Pluto flyby with New Horizons mission control via accurate-to-the-second visualizations and infographics. The results were glorious on the American Museum of Natural History’s IMAX screen.

The New Horizons spacecraft is moving very, very fast:

She is a beauty—compact yet complex, with named parts:

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What we’re looking at, via io9: New Horizons is equipped with seven different instruments, including three optical instruments, two plasma instruments, a dust sensor, and a radio science receiver/radiometer:

• LORRI: Long-range and high-resolution visible mapping
  
• SWAP: Solar wind
  
• PEPSSI: Energetic particle spectronomy
  
• Alice: Ultraviolet imaging spectroscopy
  
• Ralph: Visible mapping, infrared spectroscopic mapping
  
• SDC: Student-built dust counter
  
• Rex: Radio science and radiometry

Recent days have taught us much we did not know:

Our continuing mission:

This stamp is now totally a collector’s item and full of lies:

Oh, you beautiful, shiny space beast:

That’s no moon!!!

New Horizons is three billion miles from home and has taken 9 1/2 years to arrive. Getting her there is like “threading a needle from New York to LA”

Nitrogen, methane, carbon monoxide and more for everyone!

At this point the scientists were getting verklempt: “This is a post-human planetary encounter.”

There she is:

You can download the “OpenSpace” software utilized here in its pre-alpha release in binary form:

Its purpose is to “digitize the universe,” and in the future it will also be at work on space weather projects. Space weather. What a time to be alive.