What Is The Colour Of Pluto? This 2015 Photo By NASA Reveals Stunning Details

An old photo of Pluto is raking in likes on social media once again. The stunning photo captures a highly detailed photo of Pluto. This photo was taken in 2015 by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. The New Horizon spacecraft is the fastest spacecraft ever launched. It is tasked with studying Pluto and its five moons. The above-mentioned photo of the dwarf planet was reposted on X by a popular science-centric account. The photo was captioned, “This is the most accurate natural colour image of Pluto taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in 2015.” Commenting on it, an X user wrote, “I always thought Pluto would have a more vibrant color palette than this!”

While sharing Pluto’s close-up photo, NASA mentioned in a press note, “This image was taken as New Horizons zipped toward Pluto and its moons on July 14, 2015, from a range of 22,025 miles (35,445) kilometers.” The space research agency explained, “These natural-color images result from refined calibration of data gathered by New Horizons’ color Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). The processing creates images that would approximate the colors that the human eye would perceive, bringing them closer to “true color” than the images released near the encounter.”

Back in March 2023, NASA shared a photo of Pluto that captured a heart-shaped glacier on its surface. This glacier is called Sputnik Planitia.

A post shared by NASA (@nasa)

While sharing this photo on their Instagram, NASA wrote, “Our New Horizons spacecraft captured this heart-shaped glacier. It lies on Pluto’s surface, which also features mountains, cliffs, valleys, craters, and plains, thought to be made of methane and nitrogen ice. Pluto lies in the Kuiper belt, a donut-shaped region of icy bodies remnants from the early days of our solar system, beyond the orbit of Neptune. The small icy world is on average around 3.7 billion miles (5.9 billion kilometers) away from the Sun, but its oval-shaped orbit can bring Pluto closer to than Neptune at its closest point, expanding the tenuous atmosphere as it gets closer to our Sun.”

So far, this picture gathered over 12 lakh likes. In the comments, many people jokingly asked NASA to reinstate Pluto as the ninth planet after it was reclassified as a ‘dwarf planet’ in 2006. An Instagram exaggeratedly wrote, “Imagine the amount of pain stored in this massive heart of Pluto when disowned, that too by humans who themselves don’t understand their existence. Story of every humongous hearted existence.”