Up until now, the best images of Pluto have been a few pixels shot by the Hubble Space Telescope. The images, released in 2010, took four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to produce, according to Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
They show what NASA called an “icy and dark molasses-colored, mottled world that is undergoing seasonal changes in its surface color and brightness.”
That’s not a very glamorous description, but NASA said the images confirmed Pluto is a “dynamic world that undergoes dramatic atmospheric changes, not simply a ball of ice and rock.”
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— From 1979 to 1999, Pluto was actually closer to the sun than Neptune.
— Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
— It was named by 11-year-old Venetia Burney of Oxford, England.
