Take a Virtual Trip to the Colorful Surface of Pluto Aboard NASA'S New Horizons Spacecraft (VIDEO)

NASA did some incredible work to create a video that literally makes you feel as though you’re about to land on the surface of Pluto. The footage you see below was created from over 100 images captured by the New Horizons spacecraft during a six-week approach and close flyby—after a 9.5-year flight covering more than a billion miles,

The video begins with a distant shot of the approach to Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, and culminates with a dramatic virtual landing. The original footage was shot in black-and-white that you can see here before the magicians at NASA used low-res color images from a camera aboard the spacecraft to create a color overlay of the B&W frames for the color simulation.

The New Horizons carried powerful hi-res telescopic cameras capable of capturing features smaller than a football field and sent back hundreds of images of Pluto and its moons to scientists on Earth.

You can read more about the Pluto mission here, and see more incredible space images by visiting NASA’s multimedia website and Image of the Day page. And don’t miss our earlier story where we picked our favorite NASA images of 2016.

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