Tag Archives: New Horizons

New shots of Jupiter and its moons, from a passing NASA spacecraft on the way to Pluto, are pretty enough but raise the question of why all but a few are in black-and-white? No explanation I can find on the NASA sites. Maybe it’s because it will be so dark at Pluto, so far from the sun, that there’s no point in trying for color?

"New Horizons came within 1.4 million miles of Jupiter on Feb. 28 in a gravity assist maneuver designed to trim three years off its travel time to Pluto. For several weeks before and after this closest approach, the piano-sized robotic probe trained its seven cameras and sensors on Jupiter and its four largest moons, storing data from nearly 700 observations on its digital recorders and gradually sending that information back to Earth."