- Pluto Flyover from New Horizons (apod.nasa.gov)
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 kilometers per hour. Images from this spectacular passage have been color 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 colored 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-meter high ridges separated by kilometer-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.
- And as for the experiments that others have already made, even although these parties should be willing of themselves to communicate them to him, (which is what those who esteem them secrets will never do,) the experiments are, for the most part, accompanied with so many circumstances and superfluous elements, as to make it exceedingly difficult to disentangle the truth from its adjuncts; besides, he will find almost all of them so ill described, or even so false, (because those who made them have wished to see in them only such facts as they deemed conformable to their principles,) that, if in the entire number there should be some of a nature suited to his purpose, still their value could not compensate for the time that would be necessary to make the selection.