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Ride shotgun with New Horizons! Stunning Nasa animation lets you travel with the probe as it makes historic flyby of Pluto

The animation, made with real images taken by New Horizons in July, begins with atmospheric glow of Pluto
It ends with a view of Pluto and Charon looking appearing asas thin crescents as the probe makes its departure
During its closest approach, the New Horizons probe came to within 7,800 miles (12,500km) of Pluto's icy surface

By Ellie Zolfagharifard and Mark Prigg For Dailymail.com

Published: 11:52 EST, 2 September 2015 | Updated: 15:45 EST, 2 September 2015

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A new animation of New Horizon's mission to Pluto lets you ride shotgun with the probe as it passes the dwarf planet.

New Horizons completed its near decade-long journey to Pluto in July, with a historic flyby that captures the best images ever seen of the icy world.

Nasa has now collected these images into a mesmerising 23-second video, showing the flyby from the spacecraft’s point of view.

During its closest approach, the spacecraft came to within 7,800 miles (12,500km) of Pluto's icy surface, travelling at 30,800 mph (49,600 km/h).

The video includes a pass showing the atmospheric glow of Pluto lit by the sun and a look at Charon, Pluto’s largest moon.

‘This animation, made with real images taken by New Horizons, begins with Pluto flying in for its close-up on July 14,’ Nasa writes on the video description.

‘We then pass behind Pluto and see the atmosphere glow in sunlight before the sun passes behind Charon.

The animation ends with a wide view of Pluto and Charon looking back on each body as thin crescents as New Horizons makes its departure.

The shot was taken just seven hours after the probe's closest approach and shows peculiar layers of haze in the dwarf planet's atmosphere.

Farewell Pluto! Backlit by the sun, Pluto's atmosphere rings its silhouette like a luminous halo in this image taken by Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft around midnight EDT on July 15. This global portrait of the atmosphere was captured when the spacecraft was about 1.25 million miles (2 millionkm) from Pluto and shows structures as small as 12 miles across

This image was taken by New Horizons and sent back shortly before it started its final approach towards the dwarf planet yesterday morning. The image reveals incredible detail of craters, possible mountain ranges and icy plains on the surface of the distant world

‹ Slide me ›

This image was taken by New Horizons and sent back shortly before it started its final approach towards the dwarf planet yesterday. Slide left to see the main features on the icy world. More detailed images are expected to be released in the coming days

WHAT IS THE KUIPER BELT?

The Kuiper Belt is a freezing ring of debris orbiting more than 4 billion miles from the sun.

It is thought to be the remains of the violent and chaotic collisions that led to the formation of the planets.

There are an estimated 33,000 objects more than 60 metres across in the belt and three dwarf planets.

Astronomer Mike Brown, from Caltech in Pasadena California, has likened the Kuiper belt to the 'blood splatter' left behind by the formation of the solar system.

Although now relatively calm and stable, it is likely to be a dangerous place for New Horizons as it may be filled with unseen debris and space rocks.

'This is our equivalent on New Horizons of the Apollo 11 Earthrise,' said New Horizons' Alan Stern, adding that the image confirms the probe had succeeded in its mission.

Nasa recently selected the potential next destination for the New Horizons mission to visit after its historic July 14 flyby of the Pluto system.

It will become the first spacecraft to visit the icy blocks encircling our solar system in a ring of debris called the Kuiper Belt.

The fridge sized craft will head to a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO) known as 2014 MU69 that orbits nearly a billion miles beyond Pluto.

'Even as the New Horizon's spacecraft speeds away from Pluto out into the Kuiper Belt, and the data from the exciting encounter with this new world is being streamed back to Earth, we are looking outward to the next destination for this intrepid explorer,' said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and chief of the Nasa Science Mission Directorate at the agency headquarters in Washington.

'While discussions whether to approve this extended mission will take place in the larger context of the planetary science portfolio, we expect it to be much less expensive than the prime mission while still providing new and exciting science.'

Like all Nasa missions that have finished their main objective but seek to do more exploration, the New Horizons team must write a proposal to the agency to fund a KBO mission.

That proposal – due in 2016 – will be evaluated by an independent team of experts before Nasa can decide about the go-ahead.

Early target selection was important; the team needs to direct New Horizons toward the object this year in order to perform any extended mission with healthy fuel margins.

The video includes a pass showing the atmospheric glow of Pluto lit by the sun and a look at Charon, Pluto’s largest moon (on the left)

This animation shows how our view of Pluto has changed from its discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 through the 1990s and the latest images from the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015

If approved, New Horizons could become the first spacecraft to explore the Kuiper Belt, around four billion miles from the sun, and perhaps even continue out of the solar system itself into interstellar space, as shown in the graphic above

New Horizons will perform a series of four manoeuvres in late October and early November to set its course toward 2014 MU69 – nicknamed 'PT1' (for 'Potential Target 1') – which it expects to reach on January 1, 2019.

PLUTO'S ICY MOUNTAINS

The first high-resolution image of Pluto's surface beamed by New Horizons has revealed 11,000ft (3,350 metre) mountains made of ice.

Released alongside new pictures of Pluto's moons Charon and Hydra, it provides evidence that geological activity is still taking place on the icy world.

Scientists were shocked to see mountains as high as those in the Rockies that likely formed 100 million years ago - mere youngsters relative to the 4.56-billion-year age of the solar system. Nasa says they may still be in the process of building.

Like the rest of Pluto, this region would presumably have been pummeled by space debris for billions of years and would have once been heavily cratered - unless recent activity had given the region a facelift, erasing those pockmarks.

Any delays from those dates would cost precious fuel and add mission risk.'2014 MU69 is a great choice because it is just the kind of ancient KBO, formed where it orbits now, that the Decadal Survey desired us to fly by,' said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.

The New Horizons spacecraft – currently three billion miles [4.9 billion kilometers] from Earth – is just starting to transmit the bulk of the images and other data, stored on its digital recorders, from its historic July encounter with the Pluto system.

Originally the Hubble Space Telescope identified five objects in the Kuiper Belt that New Horizons could visit, but as their orbits have been observed that number has decreased.

Professor Alan Stern, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, said that the spacecraft may continue to explore the solar system for decades.

The spacecraft is powered by a nuclear power source which could last for another 20 years, allowing it to power its instruments and communications equipment.

Speaking before the spacecraft's launch in 2006, Professor Stern described New Horizons as an 'almost timeless object' that would not only outlast the pyramids but also the mountain ranges of the Earth.

He said the spacecraft itself would continue to glide out into the galaxy almost unchanged but it would only be possible to maintain contact with it while its power source lasted.

He also said that the New Horizons team had years of work ahead of them analysing the data being sent back from the spacecraft from its Pluto flyby.

Due to the painfully slow data link between Earth and the spacecraft, over a distance of nearly three billion miles, it will take New Horizons until 2016 before it has sent back everything it recorded.

Speaking to Spacenews.com, Professor Stern said if a mission extension was granted by Nasa, it could lead to even more exiciting discoveries.

The first ever high-resolution image of Pluto was been beamed back to Earth in July showing water ice and 11,000ft (3,350 metre) mountains. The mountains likely formed no more than 100 million years ago - mere youngsters relative to the 4.56-billion-year age of the solar system. Nasa says they may still be in the process of building

The first high-resolution image of Pluto beamed by New Horizons revealed 11,000ft (3,350 metre) mountains made of ice.

The remarkable image, released alongside new pictures of Pluto's moons Charon and Hydra, provides evidence that geological activity is still taking place on the icy world.

'We now have an isolated small planet that is showing activity after 4.5 billion years,' said Professor Stern. 'It's going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing board.'

After nine and a half years, the New Horizons spacecraft has lifted the veil on the icy world. Pictured are the probe's key instruments

'This is one of the youngest surfaces we've ever seen in the solar system,' added Dr Jeff Moore of New Horizons' Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI).

This is the first time astronomers have seen a world that is mostly composed of ice that is not orbiting a planet.

Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by the gravitational pull of a larger planetary body. Nasa says some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.

'This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,' says GGI deputy team leader Dr John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute.

The mountains are probably composed of Pluto's water-ice 'bedrock.'

Although methane and nitrogen ice covers much of the surface of Pluto, these materials are not strong enough to build the mountains. Instead, a stiffer material, most likely water-ice, created the peaks.

'At Pluto's temperatures, water-ice behaves more like rock,' said deputy GGI lead Professor Bill McKinnon of Washington University, St. Louis.

Dr Spencer said that the team has yet to find an impact crater in any of the scans, suggesting Pluto is very compared to the solar system.

The team also announced that the 'heart' feature of Pluto will now be known as the Tombaugh Regio, after Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto.

The close-up image was taken about 1.5 hours before New Horizons closest approach to Pluto, when the craft was 478,000 miles (770,000 km) from the surface of the planet.

The first high resolution images of Charon reveal an area called Mordor, the darkest area near the North pole. A swath of cliffs and troughs stretches about 600 miles (1,000km) from left to right, suggesting widespread fracturing of Charon's crust, likely a result of internal processes. At upper right, along the moon's curving edge, is a canyon estimated to be 4 to 6 miles (7 to 9km) deep