In a little over one week, NASA’s New Horizons space probe will conclude a almost decade-long journey to Pluto and other Kuiper Belt objects in order to photograph and study the dwarf planet and its moons.
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“We’re delighted with the New Horizons response to the anomaly”, said Jim Green, NASA’s director of planetary science.
But now scientists assure that even if New Horizon experiences a glitch similar to the one on July 4th it will still be set to continue on its path. The spacecraft will make its closest approach to the icy dwarf planet flying within 7,750 miles, inside the orbit of Charon, at 7:49 a.m. ET July 14. The computer was tasked with receiving a large command load at the same time it was engaged in compressing previous science data. When presented with the overload, the computer behaved as it was programmed to, entering safe mode and switching to the backup.
About 2½ days of science observations were lost because of the problem, which represents about 30 observations out of 500 planned over the next week.
“It’s a real puzzle – we don’t know what the spots are, and we can’t wait to find out”, said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder.
According to NASA, Mars gets its reddish color from iron oxide while Pluto gets its color from “hydrocarbon molecules that are formed when cosmic rays and solar ultraviolet light interact with methane in Pluto’s atmosphere and on its surface”. The western end of the swath (right image) breaks up into a series of striking dark regularly spaced spots, each hundreds of miles in size, which were first detected in New Horizons images taken in late June.
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The switch to encounter mode also means that science observations are resuming, and it shouldn’t be long before fresh imagery of Pluto and its moons starts popping up again on the New Horizons LORRI image database.
