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 thousand 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 much higher resolution images soon?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?[1] http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Resources/Press-Kits/NHP...[2] http://i.imgur.com/0vdGSV1.jpg