New Image of Pluto
These are from 5.4 million km away.
According to [1], in a few days (July 14) a Pluto system flyby is planned, at a distance of just 12.5 <i>thousand</i> km (and a speed of 13.78 km/s), and they can take images of Pluto's surface at 70m resolution. Pluto's circumference is 7232 km. So, do I understand this correctly that we can realistically expect to see <i>much</i> higher resolution images soon?<p>Or is the bandwidth really that limiting? It seems that even at 1kbps it would be possible and worth it to transfer some slightly higher resolution images. A typical color JPEG image at 640x480 is at most around 200kB, so that would take 27 minutes to transfer. For example here[2] is Mars at 640x480 in 38.4 kB. Is that unrealistic?<p>[1] <a href="http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Resources/Press-Kits/NHPlutoFlybyPressKitJuly2015.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Resources/Press-Kits/NHP...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://i.imgur.com/0vdGSV1.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/0vdGSV1.jpg</a>