Pluto True Color

Explore the true color version of Pluto's giant moon, Charon. More about New Horizons, the first mission to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. More about Pluto, the best known world in the Kuiper Belt.

More on the Kuiper Belt, a vast ring of icy debris beyond the orbit of Neptune. True Colors of Pluto This is the most accurate natural color image of Pluto taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft in 2015. The diversity of geologic landforms on Pluto's surface rivals that of Mars.

Captions English New Horizon's true color view of Pluto as it approached the planet on July 14, 2015 Portuguese Imagem de Plutão tirada pela missão não tripulada New Horizons da NASA Malayalam പ്ലൂട്ടോ Hindi प्लूटो Chinese (China) 冥王星图像 Chinese 冥王星图像 Arabic بلوتو هو أكبر كوكب قزم يحتوي على خمسة أقمار. Four images from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with color data from the Ralph instrument to create this global view of Pluto. (The lower right edge of Pluto in this view currently lacks high-resolution color coverage.) The images, taken when the spacecraft was 450,000 kilometers (280,000 miles) away, show features as small as 2.2 kilometers (1.4 miles.

What color is Pluto, really? It took some effort to figure out. Even given all of the images sent back to Earth when the robotic New Horizons spacecraft sped past Pluto in 2015, processing these multi-spectral frames to approximate what the human eye would see was challenging. The result featured here, released three years after the raw data was acquired by New Horizons, is the highest.

In today's image, we see the dwarf planet Pluto as imaged by the New Horizons spacecraft back in 2015. The image has been processed to reveal what Pluto woul. What is the true color of Pluto? There are two different images of Pluto floating around that claim to be so: one that is a gray-ish version of New Horizons heart, and a brown.

The result featured here, released three years after the raw data was acquired by New Horizons, is the highest resolution true color image of Pluto ever taken. Visible in the image is the light-colored, heart-shaped, Tombaugh Regio, with the unexpectedly smooth Sputnik Planitia, made of frozen nitrogen, filling its western lobe.