Ride Along with New Horizons on its Pluto Flyby

On July 14, 2015, after nine and a half years journeying across the Solar System, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft made its historic

close pass of Pluto

and its moon Charon. Traveling a relative velocity of nearly 13.8 km/s (that's almost 31,000 mph!) New Horizons passed through the Pluto system in a matter of hours but the views it captured from approach to departure held the world spellbound with their unexpected beauty. Those images and data – along with a bit of imagination – have been used by space imaging enthusiast Björn Jónsson to create an animation of New Horizons' Pluto pass as if we were traveling along with the spacecraft – check it out above.

You can find more science images and discoveries about Pluto and Charon from New Horizons

here

, and see more renderings and animations by Jónsson

on his website here.