Pluto may be billions of kilometres away, but we can still imagine what it would be like to stand on the icy dwarf world’s surface. That’s because it’s always Pluto Time somewhere.
Pluto Time is a special moment of interplanetary kinship that happens twice daily, everywhere around the world. It’s that instant just before dawn and after sunset, when the sky on Earth is the same illumination as the surface of Pluto at noon. For the last few weeks leading up to the historic New Horizons flyby, NASA’s been encouraging everyone to get outside at Pluto Time, snap a photo, and post it on social media.
Here are a few of the highlights the space agency collected from around the world:
After New Horizons soars past Pluto at a speed of 48,000km/h next week, it will send back the best images to date of the tiny, distant, ice world. The New Horizons mission will tell us a tremendous amount about Pluto’s atmosphere and surface composition as it explores the global geology and morphology of Pluto and its moons.
If you missed this particular Pluto Time while reading this post, don’t feel too bad. Go have a drink for Pluto anyway. In a way, Pluto Time’s just getting started for all of us.