Ever wonder just how majestic the icy plains and mountains of everyone’s favorite former planet might look like?
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Thanks to NASA, which celebrated the two-year anniversary of the landmark New Horizons Pluto flyby on Friday, you can experience the magic for yourself.
The space agency released two epic videos of the dramatic flyby with "spectacular new perspectives of the many unusual features that were discovered and which have reshaped our views of the Pluto system – from a vantage point even closer than the spacecraft itself," NASA officials wrote in a news release Monday.
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In the first video, you’re placed you in the passenger seat as you journey over the nitrogen ice plains (called Sputnik Planitia), the planet’s cratered and rocky mountain terrains and more.
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In the second video, you soar close to and over Pluto’s moon, Charon, including over its deep canyons and craters with names as exciting as the flight itself: Serenity Chasma and Mordor Macula.
To emphasize Pluto's and Charon's topography, digital mappers Paul Schenk and John Blackwell of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, exaggerated the terrains in the videos by a factor of two to three times.
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The New Horizons spacecraft flyby on July 14, 2015, was NASA's closest flyby of Pluto to date.
The spacecraft collected more than 1,200 images of Pluto and tens of gigabits of data that led to discoveries about Pluto’s geological diversity (icy plains, overpowering mountains) and its atmosphere.
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