NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is sound and ready to proceed with its planned flyby of Pluto on July 14. The craft has taken some images of the dwarf planet’s surface that have astronomers talking.
New Horizons had experienced a technological hiccup on July 4 when the spacecraft lost contact with Earth for nearly an hour and a half. The craft went into safe mode as a precaution, but no hardware or software faults were found. The technical team scrambled to trace the problem to a timing flaw and, over the next few days, the mission was back on schedule.
Mission Control at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland celebrated the good news with cheers and applause on Tuesday, according to NBC News.
Images of Pluto, taken before the anomaly on July 4, have gotten scientists excited. The photographs offer intriguing previews of the views to be seen when the probe comes closer to Pluto. The right image reveals three dark spots that astronomers estimate to be hundreds of miles in size.
“This object is unlike any other that we have observed,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said during a news briefing on Monday, as reported by Scientific American.
The mysterious markings on Pluto’s surfaced have raised interest and anticipation of next week’s flyby. A probe will be launched toward Pluto and will come within 8,000 miles (12,500 kilometers) of the dwarf planet’s surface at 7:49 a.m. ET on July 14.
The NASA mission, which launched in 2006, was designed to examine the surface of Pluto and the largest of its three moons, Charon. As New Horizons has come closer to Pluto, it has taken images that have provided tantalizing data and clues of the planet’s surface, atmosphere and geologic activity.
Pluto is known as a dwarf planet and 3.6 billion miles (5.8 billion kilometers) from the sun. Pluto resides in a region known as the Kuiper belt, which is composed of thousands of icy objects similar in size of the dwarf planet.
