NASA released an “appetite-whetter” of a Pluto image Wednesday as the New Horizons spacecraft sped toward its July 14 closeup of the dwarf planet.
Pluto is still a bit of a blob in photos taken by the spacecraft’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) from about 70 million miles away earlier this month. But it revealed some features, including what could be a polar ice cap.
“For now we can only say that it’s very suspiciously suggestive of a polar cap,” said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern.
“We are so excited to be on the verge of discovery,” said Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “We’re 98 percent of the way through the journey and very excited to be on Pluto’s doorstep.”
Tod Lauer of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory pulled additional scientific information from the camera images, which were only 4.5 pixels across.
Lauer had used the same technique to pull scientific results from the Hubble Space Telescope, beginning with its initial deployment, when its images were blurred by aberrations in its mirror.
“All cameras blur light at some level and turn a star into a little blob,” Lauer said in a telephone interview.
“If you are very careful to measure exactly how that blob is blobby, there are mathematics you can do to correct for that. It’s complex. Images aren’t pure. There’s noise in them, and when you amplify small details, they look like junk.”
A second step in the process, called “deconvolution,” allows you to “latch onto the signal that you want and leave out the noise,” Lauer said.
It only gets better from here, Lauer said.
Project scientist Hal Weaver said Lauer’s image processing pulled out “details a month in advance of what we thought.”
Weaver, from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said better images and movies are on the way over the next few weeks, with daily observations beginning May 28.
