Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

This image of Pluto’s largest moon Charon, taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft 10 hours before its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 290,000 miles (470,000 kilometers), is a recently downlinked, much higher quality version of a Charon image released on July 15. Charon, which is 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) in diameter, displays a surprisingly complex geological history, including tectonic fracturing; relatively smooth, fractured plains in the lower right;

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If you liked the first historic images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, you’ll love what’s to come.

Seven weeks after New Horizons sped past the Pluto system to study Pluto and its moons – previously unexplored worlds – the mission team will begin intensive downlinking of the tens of gigabits of data the spacecraft collected and stored on its digital recorders. The process moves into high gear on Saturday, Sept. 5, with the entire downlink taking about one year to complete.

“This is what we came for—these images, spectra and other data types that are going to help us understand the origin and the evolution of the Pluto system for the first time,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “And what’s coming is not just the remaining 95 percent of the data that’s still aboard the spacecraft— it’s the best datasets, the highest-resolution images and spectra, the most important atmospheric datasets, and more. It’s a treasure trove. ”

Even moving at light speed, the radio signals from New Horizons containing data need more than 4 ½ hours to cover the 3 billion miles to reach Earth.

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One of the best ways to learn how our solar system evolved is to look at younger star systems in the early stages of development. Recently, a team of astronomers including NASA scientists discovered a Jupiter-like planet within a young system that could serve as a decoder ring for understanding how planets formed around our sun. The new planet, called 51 Eridani (Eri) b, is the first exoplanet discovered by the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), a new instrument operated by an international collaboration, and installed on the 8-meter Gemini South Telescope in Chile. The GPI was designed specifically for discovering and analyzing faint, young planets orbiting bright stars via “direct imaging,” in which astronomers use adaptive optics to sharpen the image of a target star, then block out its starlight. Any remaining incoming light is then analyzed, and the brightest spots indicate a possible planet. “This is exactly the kind of planet we envisioned discovering when we designed GPI”, says James Graham, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and project scientist for GPI. Other methods of planet detection are indirect, such as the transit method used by NASA’s Kepler mission, in which it discovers planets by measuring the loss of starlight when a planet passes in front of its star. As Bruce Macintosh, a professor of physics at Stanford University and member of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology figuratively described, to detect planets, Kepler sees their shadow while GPI sees their glow.

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