New Horizons visited Pluto 10 years ago. We're still learning from it

[usonian]

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/new-horizons-pluto-flyby-anniversary

Planetary scientist Kelsi Singer was an undergraduate in 2006 when a spunky spacecraft launched with an ambitious goal: to fly by Pluto. It would take nearly a decade for the New Horizons probe to zoom past its target in the far reaches of the solar system.

“Oh, that’s so far off,” Singer thought at the time. “Nine and a half years to get to Pluto? That’s like forever.”

Now, Singer, who is deputy principal investigator for the New Horizons mission, and other scientists are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the spacecraft’s historic encounter with the beloved dwarf planet. New Horizons got within 12,500 kilometers of Pluto’s surface. Images and other data gathered during the flyby have transformed researchers’ understanding of the icy world.

“We all thought Pluto would be a little bit less interesting than we found it; we thought it would be more cold and dead,” says Singer, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. “Since the flyby, we have basically rewritten the textbooks.”

A sheet of nitrogen.