Astronomy Picture of the Day

Explanation: What if you could fly over Pluto -- what might you see? The New Horizons spacecraft did just this in 2015 July as it shot past the distant world at a speed of about 80,000 kilometres per hour. Images from this spectacular passage have been colour enhanced, vertically scaled, and digitally combined into the featured two-minute time-lapse video. As your journey begins, light dawns on mountains thought to be composed of water ice but coloured by frozen nitrogen. Soon, to your right, you see a flat sea of mostly solid nitrogen that has segmented into strange polygons that are thought to have bubbled up from a comparatively warm interior. Craters and ice mountains are common sights below. The video dims and ends over terrain dubbed bladed because it shows 500-metre high ridges separated by kilometre-sized gaps. The robotic New Horizons spacecraft has too much momentum to ever return to Pluto and is now headed out of our Solar System.