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New Horizons Spots Possible Polar Cap on Pluto
As NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft hurries toward its epic rendezvous with dwarf planet Pluto, the little world is coming into focus a bit more quickly than expected. Today, thanks to some image processing wizardry, new images from New Horizons are already revealing some of the features marking the dwarf planet’s surface, including a possible polar cap.
“We’re actually pulling out details about a month in advance of where we thought we’d be,” said New Horizons project scientist Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. “By the time we get to the closest approach to Pluto, it’s going to blow us all away.”
That’ll happen on July 14, when New Horizons is scheduled to fly within 12,500 kilometers of Pluto.
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