This is the area that will present itself when New Horizons reaches its closest point to Pluto.
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Despite the complicated diagnosis and recovery efforts, the New Horizons spacecraft is healthy again and on track to resume collecting data on Tuesday.
“You can feel the energy in the team”, Stern, who’s based at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, says in “Mission Pluto“.
“When you look at that picture of New York City, you can see the runways of LaGuardia [airport]”, New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern told Mashable in an earlier interview.
Has the Pluto mission gone wrong? NASA’s director of planetary science, Jim Green, assured journalists Monday. “On the dwarf planet Pluto, the reddish color is likely caused by hydrocarbon molecules that are formed when cosmic rays and solar ultraviolet light interact with methane in Pluto’s atmosphere and on its surface”. Glen Fountain, the mission’s project manager said that the probe did exactly what it is programmed to do. A spacecraft in safe mode ceases collecting data and instead transmits a trickle of a signal to Earth, asking for help from teams on the ground.
On Saturday, New Horizons experienced a shutdown of its radio communications with Earth for 81 minutes as it drew nearer toward the end of a nine-and-a-half-year journey to the unexplored regions of outer space.
New Horizons’ difficulty is getting all that information back to Earth.
The investigation into the anomaly that caused New Horizons to enter safe mode on July 4 has confirmed that the main computer was overloaded due to a timing conflict in the spacecraft command sequence. That’s because a planet’s rotational rate depends on many different things, from the angular momentum it picks up during its formation to gravitational interactions with moons to geologic activity and even weather events.
“We are still very far away, so these observations are not almost as important as those we will make in the Pluto system when we will by 100 times closer than we were this weekend”, Stern said.
New Horizon took a photo of Pluto right before a glitch temporarily shut it down.
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Even before its closest encounter with Pluto, New Horizons was giving scientists new details about the planet: Images taken during the approach showed a series a black spots near Pluto’s equator, each hundreds of miles across.
