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The New Horizons team assembled simulated flights over Pluto and Charon that include some of the sharpest images and topographic data that the spacecraft gathered during its historic flyby on July 14, 2015. These are the first "movies" of Pluto and Charon made from the highest-resolution black-and-white image strips, taken by New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), as the spacecraft zipped by at more than 30,000 miles per hour.

Features as small as about 230 feet (70 meters) are visible on Pluto's icy, rocky surface. Moviemaker and New Horizons science team member Paul Schenk, from the Lunar and Planetary Institute, used high-resolution topographic mapping analysis to show surface relief in the nitrogen-laden ice sheet in the Sputnik Planitia impact basin - half of Pluto's famous "heart" feature.

This simulated flight starts near the center of the ice sheet and ends on the rugged ice-carved southeastern rim of the basin 300 miles (500 kilometers) away, where the difference between the highest and lowest points is more than 2 miles (3.5 kilometers). Also prominently visible are the small pits that cover the surface of the otherwise low-relief ice sheet. Schenk also added color data from New Horizons' Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) to bring out the reddish hues in Pluto's highlands.

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