For Christmas this year, NASA celebrated its New Horizons mission and the first close-up images it captured of the distant dwarf planet.
According to NASA's New Horizons blog, the spacecraft captured the images with an infrared spectrometer instrument called LEISA.
"Pluto gets into the holiday spirit, decked out in red and green. This image was produced by the New Horizons composition team, using a pair of Ralph/LEISA instrument scans obtained at approximately 9:40 AM on July 14, from a mean range of 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers)," NASA said in a statement. "The resolution is about 7 kilometers per LEISA pixel. Three infrared wavelength ranges (2.28-2.23, 1.25-1.30 and 1.64-1.73 microns) were placed into the three color channels (red, green and blue, respectively) to create this false color Christmas portrait."
This results in Pluto getting a multicolor look, an effect literally and scientifically similar to peering at Pluto through a stained glass window.
"By scanning this image sensor with its linear filter across a scene and quickly recording many images during the scan (like a movie), LEISA builds up a two-dimensional map of the scene in front of the camera with a measurement of the infrared spectrum (the brightness versus wavelength) at every location in the image," Alex Parker, a research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., wrote in the blog post. "It makes this complex measurement with exactly zero moving parts - highly reliable for deep-space operations."
