Fly over Pluto's moon Charon in spectacular style
Video made of processed images from the New Horizons Pluto flyby shows what it would be like to have a close encounter with Charon.
NASA's New Horizons mission is far, far from home, way farther than any human could imagine going with our current technology.
Fortunately, we have spacecraft to handle tasks like visiting Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. We also have talented people back on Earth who can turn NASA images into thrilling flyover videos.
A video called "Charon flyover (closest footage ever)" appeared on YouTube on September 26. It's a mere 13 seconds long, but it gives you the sensation of soaring over Charon's pockmarked, rotating surface.
The video was created by Roman Tkachenko, who has a series of fun 3D Pluto renderings and flyovers available on YouTube under the username New Horizons Processed. Tkachenko takes freely available NASA images and processes them into renderings that give viewers a sense of being up close with the dwarf planet and its satellites.
New Horizons launched in 2006 on a mission to study some of the largest objects in the Kuiper Belt, a region of the solar system that starts just beyond Neptune.
The spacecraft undertook a fascinating flyby of dwarf planet Pluto on July 14 and is still in the process of sending images back to Earth. That means we can look forward to more photos, scientific discoveries and entertaining video renderings.