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First coloured images of Pluto captured

───   08:47 Wed, 15 Apr 2015

First coloured images of Pluto captured | News Article

Orlando - The New Horizons probe, which is bearing down on Pluto, has captured its first colour image of the distant dwarf planet.

The picture, just released by the US space agency, shows a reddish world accompanied by its biggest moon, Charon. New Horizons is set to barrel past Pluto on July 14th. It will acquire a mass of data that it will then return to Earth very slowly over the course of the next 16 months. At the current separation of nearly five billion km, it takes 4.6 hours for radio signals to come back and the bit rate is painfully slow. But the encounter is set to be the major space event of 2015. It will complete the reconnaissance of the "classical nine" planets of our Solar System; New Horizon's flyby will mean everyone has been visited at least once by a space probe. BBC

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