Pluto'shorizon spans the foreground in this artist's vision,gazing sunward across that distant an not yet explored world.Titled New Horizons, the painting als depicts Pluto'scompanion, Charon, as a darkened, ghostly apparition witha luminou crescentagainst a starry background.Beyon Charon,the diminished Sun is immersed ina flattened cloud of zodiacal dust.Here, Pluto's ruddy colors are based on existin astronomicalobservations while imagined bu scientifically tenable detailsprovided by the artist include high atmospheric cirrus anddark plumes from surface vents, in analogy to Neptune's large moo Tritonexplored by th Voyager2 spacecraft in 1989.Craters suggest bombardment b KuiperBelt objects, a newly understoo population ofouter solar system bodies likel related to th Pluto-Charon system.NASA is now considering a future robotic reconnaissanc missionto Pluto-Charon and the Kuiper Belt which could reach the distantworlds late in the next decade.
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