Pluto flyby photos
Pluto, the dwarf planet send amazing surface pictures via New Horizon spacecraft after travelling 9 years and 3 billion miles. The detailed image send back to earth about 7, 750 miles above the surface, roughly the distance from Mumbai to New York. Pluto is the dwarf planet in a region of space at the edge of the solar system called Kuiper belt and the first trans-Neptunian object to be discovered. It is the largest and second-most massive known dwarf planet in the Solar System and the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object directly orbiting the Sun. Astronomers call it a three zone space. The first zone contains the rocky terrestrial planets of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, the second zone is home to gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and the third zone along side Pluto in the Kuiper belt, are comets and more than100,000 miniature worlds.
The New Horizon spacecraft launched o 1st January 2006, had slingshot effect of Jupiter in February 2007 adding 9000 miles per hour to its speed, in 2008 it crosses the orbit of Saturn, in March 2011 crosses the orbit of Uranus and in August 2014 it crosses the orbit of Neptune.
Images beamed back from New Horizon have shown Pluto in shades of red and orange, with hints of valleys, mountains and crators