COLLOQUIUM: New Horizons at Pluto

Pluto and its five known moons have been transformed from mysterious, barely resolved or unresolved points of light, only dimly viewed from very far away, to astonishing worlds of unimagined complexity by the recent visit of the small interplanetary probe called New Horizons. Pluto, with its icy plains, mountains, flowing glaciers, and hazy atmosphere, and Charon, only half as large but dramatically different, are revealed in amazing detail by the instruments on New Horizons. This talk will present the two imaging instruments on New Horizons, the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and Ralph (just a name, not an acronym) and what they saw in the Pluto system.