NASA probe New Horizons made the first photos of Pluto

NASA probe New Horizons made the first photos of Pluto

After 9 years of traveling around the solar system, the NASA New Horizons spacecraft is currently on its way to its ultimate goal: the dwarf planet Pluto and its family of ice satellites more than 3, 1 billion miles away (5,000,000,000 km).

The image above, taken with a LORRI (Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) camera, shows Pluto and its largest satellite, Charon. This is the first image made by this mission. “Pluto is finally becoming more than just a point of light,” says Hal Weaver, a scientist from the New Horizons project. "LORRI has photographed Pluto, and now the dwarf planet will become more and more in images as the spacecraft approaches its target."

The image above was taken on February 4, 2015 on the 109th anniversary of Clyde Tombo, a self-taught astronomer from Illinois who discovered Pluto in 1930 while working at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.

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