It’s about the safest color if you want to resell.
Exactly the way I felt, amplified even more by the fact that the sky crane deployment was so bloody complicated I was sure something was going to go wrong!
According to the local news there is a press briefing at 3:00 PM ET today at which the first of the close flyby pics are supposed to be released. It’s being streamed live at NASA TV and by various news organizations.
My favorite model of the Solar System is the one in Sweden. It’s… well, it’s the size of Sweden.
The sun is represented by the Globe Arena in Stockholm. The Earth, 64 cm (25 inches) across, is in the Museum of Natural History, still in the city. Pluto is in a town in the middle of nowhere, 300 km (186 miles) away and 12 cm (4,7 inches) across.
But even then you’re not even a third of the way there before you’re out of the system. The outer bodies like Eris and Sedna are way further up north, with the edge of the heliosphere above the Arctic Circle.
I like it because it gives you not only a sense of the scale, but also of the sheer hassle of trekking through the thing. It’s like the family vacation from hell. I mean, leave the safe confounds of the urban inner system, with Starbucks, McDonald’s and reasonable weather, to go to some frozen wasteland in Northern Sweden, where nothing ever happens, to look a pebble? Do we have to? Oh, well, if it’s for science… see you in nine years, or thereabouts. 
I believe the current theory is various hydrocarbons contribute to the color. Organic molecules (meaning, carbon-containing, not necessarily originating from life) are apparently more common out there than once believed.
It’s what you get when you zap, say, some methane with ultraviolet light.
(I only learned about that yesterday, BTW. This whole thing is proving quite the educational experience for me.)
More pics! Official gallery is here!
MOUNTAINS OF PLUTO!
Hydra, like comet 67p/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, appears to be another giant space duck.
So New Horizon was launched in 2006.
Do we know how many scientists (engineers) that were involved in the design and launch are still working on the project.
I would assume that many were re-assigned while waiting for the probe to reach its destination.
The first high resolution photo of an area of Pluto shows no impact craters, which indicates recent (in geologic time) geological activity. This was unexpected because they didn’t think there would be enough heat or tidal forces to cause such activity. (This is from the NASA TV live press conference.)
Thanks, very interesting.
I loved how the team named that dark region on top of Charon, “Mordor.” It totally looks like Mordor, with a little Mt. Doom in there.
I heard on my local news that it arrived 72 seconds early.
That’s incredible. 
It was speeding.
The fact that they can have such a precise definition of “arrived”, and can measure it to that precision, is amazing. I assume they used radar to measure the distance from Pluto.
Anyone else catch the NOVA program about New Horizons on PBS last night? Fascinating. It was fun watching the scientists age 9 years. They see the probe as their “baby.”
I didn’t know they used Jupiter’s gravity to propel the probe even faster out to Pluto. Without that, it would have taken three additional years to get there. It takes 4 1/2 hours for radio waves to travel to Earth and back. If something went wrong, scientists wouldn’t be able to do anything about it for 9 hours. The fact that the probe hasn’t been destroyed or damaged by unseen space debris is rather mind-boggling.
I also have a much better understanding of why Pluto’s planetary status was downgraded.
Did anyone else hate the narrator in the National Geographic Pluto show? His over the top enthusiasm and stoner dude accent seemed so forced.
"Whoa, dude, space is like sooo totally awesome, man! "
Yeh, he’s the BrainGames guy, and he gets on my nerves. We’re not children, man.
Here’s a cool animated gif of Pluto through the years, on NASA’s Gallery page.
Not radar, but they have New Horizons echo back a timing signal sent out from Earth and they know to about a millionth of a second just how long the round trip takes- even taking Relativity into account. Indeed, it’s intriguing that currently time can be directly measured more accurately than any other physical value.
So they’re using the distance from Earth rather than the distance from Pluto? Interesting. It seems like there would be less assumptions involved if it actually measured the distance to Pluto (at least when it’s relatively close).
They’ll also be able to measure the relative orientation of Pluto, its moons, and background stars with high precision using a star tracker and the navigation camera. It also needs to figure out the direction to Earth to point its antenna, though I don’t know how much that’s measured (based on radio signal strength vs direction) or calculated.
Combined with high precision data about the distance from and speed relative to the Earth, there’s enough information to solve for the position and trajectory of the probe relative to Pluto.