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Take a look at this. This beautiful thing is Pluto. I know, it’s not blue. Weird eh? This is the most clear image we have of the once thought to be unreachable planet. Sure it took NASA scientists ~9 years to get there, but they made it there pretty much right on time; 72 seconds early to be precise. This photo is the last one they took before the New Horizons spacecraft reached the moment of closest approach and went radio silent so it could gather as much data as possible. Around 5:40pm, it will finish its collection and start transmitting today’s info which is expected to have images with 100x better resolution.

If you’re following the New Horizons account on Twitter, you’ll start to get pictures after 6pm tonight, but the good ones won’t come out until tomorrow. To give you a better understanding of what to expect for resolution, I’ll let the guys at NASA tell you:

 

 

Just so you can geek out for a while, It’s transmitting a huge amount of data over a 3 billion mile distance using an antenna that radiates only 12 Watts. That means the data takes almost four hours to get back to earth. Can you imagine the roaming charges on something like that? Oh yeah, AND this is all done with technology that was created in 2005, a year and a half before the first iPhone came out. What else happened in 2005?

  • Lance Armstrong won a record seventh straight Tour de France.
  • Michael Jackson is found not guilty of Child Molestation Charges.
  • Microsoft releases the Xbox 360 gaming console in North America.
  • Hurricane Katrina.

 

The internet has already had it’s way with the latest photos: