Pluto Flyover from New Horizons
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May 18, 2025
The universe has spent billions of years making things that shine. On your birthday, we celebrate one of its quieter masterpieces.
Pluto Flyover from New Horizons
Birthday · May 18, 2025
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APOD published May 18, 2025 · Video still. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
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.