STYX’s band members shared laughs with the scientist who discovered Styx, Pluto’s moon. Flight controllers managed to regain contact with the spacecraft in just over an hour and correct the tense situation, occurring after a relatively quiet journey of 3 billion miles and 9½ years.
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“Now – along with Pluto in one’s points of interest – today we’re on the threshold of going back to functionality”, NASA’s astral knowledge executive Jim Green said within the assertion.
Images taken from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) has shown patterns of dark and light areas on Pluto. It will fly by within 7,700 miles of the surface.
About 2½ days of science observations were lost because of the problem.
“Pluto’s atmosphere is alive and well, and has not frozen out on the surface”, noted New Horizons deputy project scientist Leslie Young. A longtime fan, Showalter autographed a poster of Pluto and its moons taken by the New Horizons probe for the band, writing: “I wish Styx (had been) so easy to see from Hubble!” “It’s a real puzzle – we don’t know what the spots are, and we can’t wait to find out”, said Stern.
Pluto and all five of its known moons are visible in the images, but scientists saw no rings, new moons, or hazards of any kind. The main computer was multi-tasking in preparation for the big event coming up – and dealing with heavier, more complex data loads than expected – when the trouble arose.
The decision on whether to keep the spacecraft on its original course or adopt a Safe Haven by Other Trajectory had to be made this week since the last opportunity to maneuver the spacecraft onto an alternate trajectory is July 4. That’s exciting news for any space enthusiast, and as New Horizons draws closer and closer, we can’t help but wonder what it will find next.
New Horizons – about the size of a baby grand piano – was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2006.
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Styx’s Tommy Shaw, Lawrence Gowan, and Todd Sucherman toured mission control at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland and checked out the latest NASA images.
