Pluto will get its closeup in less than a week, despite a heart-stopping glitch that briefly silenced the New Horizons spacecraft over the holiday weekend. Now, the craft is back in action and entering what NASA calls encounter mode—where gathering data about the frosted world trumps just about everything else.

At 12:34 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, New Horizons’ computers will initiate thousands of autonomous command sequences that will direct, the piano-size robot to learn as much as it can about Pluto and its five moons. (Learn more in National Geographic's July cover story on Pluto.)

“The spacecraft is ready now to execute the nine days of flyby operations,” said the mission's principal investigator, Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute. “New Horizons is operating flawlessly.”

Though closest approach is still a week away, photos coming back from the $700- million mission are already tantalizing. The latest, released yesterday, show an oddly blotchy terrain punctuated by a dark band around Pluto’s middle.

By July 14, New Horizons will have flown within 8,000 miles of the dwarf planet. At a speed of roughly 30,000 miles per hour, the flyby will be a fleeting encounter, with the craft furiously collecting enough data to keep Earthlings busy for years.

“We came a long way to explore Pluto, and all the early indications are, Pluto’s not gonna let us down,” Stern said. “This object is unlike any other that we have ever observed.”

But this past weekend wasn’t easy for the team.

Around 2 p.m. on July 4, New Horizons lost contact with Earth. At The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland—home of the mission’s operations center—phones started ringing just as Independence Day revelers would normally be knee-deep in hot dogs.

The first call went to Glen Fountain, the mission’s project manager. He rang Stern, who was in his office on site. Stern then rang Jim Green, NASA’s planetary science director, who was awaiting the imminent birth of his grandson (“What a tremendous weekend,” Green said).

Within minutes, Stern and his colleagues had gathered in mission control. A little more than an hour later, they re-established contact with New Horizons, and quickly figured out the source of the problem: The spacecraft’s’ main onboard computer had attempted two computing-intensive tasks at once. Overloaded, the system switched over the backup computer, which entered what’s called a “safe mode.”
Picture of latest images of pluto from new horizons

“The spacecraft did exactly what it was supposed to do,” Fountain said. 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.

“Have you ever tried to recite a list of memorized numbers while someone is reading a different list of numbers aloud to you? You'd probably go into safe mode too,” tweeted New Horizons team member Alex Parker.

Once the craft is in encounter mode, nothing similar is likely to muck up crucial data collecting. If some kind of glitch does occur during flyby, New Horizons will restart itself and continue gathering data instead of shutting down and signaling for help, Fountain says.

In fact, New Horizons’ misadventures in multitasking cost the team very little in terms of mission science. There were only around 30 observations planned during the period it stopped collecting data, a fraction of the nearly 500 observations planned between July 4 and the end of the encounter period, which goes through July 16.

“There was zero impact to the highest priority science,” Stern said.

As the spacecraft continues to close the distance between itself and its mini-planet, teams will be eagerly gathering data on the interplanetary environment, Pluto’s surface features and composition, and the characteristics of those five crazy moons. Already, the images coming back are boggling.

While Pluto’s large moon Charon is gray (with a big dark patch near one pole), Pluto itself is vaguely reddish. The planet’s surface varies wildly in brightness: Some parts are bright, and others very dark. Now, though it’s just 5 million miles from Pluto, New Horizons is still too far away to resolve any of those surface features in detail, but available images reveal a dark band of mystery material wrapped around the planet’s equator. In one area, that band is broken up into four evenly-sized splotches, each about the size of Missouri.

As with most things about Pluto, those spots are still mysterious. But not for long. “I think everyone on the project and in the public is having lots of fun trying to figure out what those markings mean,” says Paul Schenk, a New Horizons team member from the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute.

 Sinful Hero wrote:
Always exciting to learn more about the planets in our solar system.

How long does it take for the probe to transmit data back to earth? I would assume there's some lay time there.

BBC wrote:New Horizons' difficulty is getting all that information back to Earth. The distance to Pluto is vast - more than 4.5 billion km - and this makes for very low bit rates.
It will take 16 months to send back all the science acquired over the coming days.

Wikipedia wrote:Communication with the spacecraft is via X band. The craft had a communication rate of 38 kbit/s at Jupiter; at Pluto's distance, a rate of approximately 1 kbit/s is expected. Besides the low bandwidth, Pluto's distance also causes a latency of about 4.5 hours (one-way).

BASICS

ASTRONOMY FOR DUMMIES - The ONE BASIC FACT - read and weep about yourself

Any celestial body that can not be observed with a telescope located ON Earth, is fake.

This one basic fact implies that for instance Pluto (the first example among millions) is an invention created by the illuminati.

Decades later the illuminati used NASA and the soviet space agency to serially produce Pluto type of hoaxes.

 reds8n wrote:
http://gizmodo.com/these-pluto-truthers-insist-nasa-images-are-fake-1717828679

Spoiler:

BASICS

ASTRONOMY FOR DUMMIES - The ONE BASIC FACT - read and weep about yourself

Any celestial body that can not be observed with a telescope located ON Earth, is fake.

This one basic fact implies that for instance Pluto (the first example among millions) is an invention created by the illuminati.

Decades later the illuminati used NASA and the soviet space agency to serially produce Pluto type of hoaxes.

Pluto isn't real !

 KingCracker wrote:
DAMMIT!! I'M NOT WANTING TO LIVE ANYMORE

New images from the New Horizons spacecraft's close encounter with Pluto this week show the dwarf planet emerging in wonderfully perplexing detail.

“I’m still having to remind myself to take deep breaths,” Jeff Moore of NASA’s Ames Research Center said Friday, when NASA released several new pictures from Tuesday's Pluto flyby. "This landscape is just astoundingly amazing.”

One new image shows a curiously young terrain marked by smooth, icy plains that’s north of a spiky mountain range revealed earlier in the week. Another piece of data shows an unexplained clump of carbon monoxide ice clustered over the left ventricle of the smooth, heart-shaped patch on Pluto’s face.

There’s also a new photo of Nix, one of Pluto’s small, tumbling, potato-shaped moons.

Now, with Pluto already more than 2 million miles in its rearview mirror, New Horizons is sailing into the Kuiper Belt, a donut-shaped debris field outside the orbit of Neptune that’s filled with countless icy worlds. It will continue sending data from its Pluto encounter for the next 16 months.

Those observations will include information about the dwarf planet’s atmosphere and composition, plus more views of its surface features.

“I’m a little biased, but I think the solar system saved the best for last,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern told reporters on Friday.

After a 9-and-a-half-year, 3 billion-mile journey, New Horizons flew through the Pluto system—the planet and its moons—on Tuesday. It was a fleeting encounter, with the craft furiously gathering data as it sped past the frosted dwarf at 31,000 miles per hour.

Earlier images from New Horizons revealed a multi-colored world with a large, bright heart-shaped region called Tombaugh Regio, in honor of Pluto’s discoverer. The heart is hugged on either side by dark splotches.

Most strikingly, the planet’s youthful-looking surface is surprisingly craterless, suggesting a complex geological history. That observation, along with a similarly young surface on Pluto’s large moon Charon, is challenging ideas about how icy worlds maintain their internal heat, previously thought to require some help from a nearby giant planet’s gravity.

“Could icy worlds minding their own business—not orbiting some giant planet—also be geologically active? The answer is obviously yes,” says Moore. “Pluto is every bit as geologically active as any place we’ve seen anyplace else in the solar system.”

This simulated flyover of Pluto passes the Norgay Montes (mountains named for Tenzing Norgay, who scaled Everest) and the Sputnik Plain (named for Earth's first artificial satellite).

Covered in a thin veneer of exotic frost, Pluto is home to many varied terrains. Scientists have already released an image showing icy mountains punching through that frost and rising as high as 11,000 feet. Next to those mountains (now called Norgay Montes in honor of Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay) is a region of smooth, icy plains that are occasionally interrupted by networks of polygonal fractures and oddly bumpy hills.

“When I saw this image the first time, I decided I was going to call it ‘not easy to explain terrain’,” Moore says. “This could be only a week old for all we know.”

Within those plains, called Sputnik Planum, are darkish spots that could be tantalizing evidence of geysers erupting from Pluto’s surface. It wouldn’t be the first time such geysers have been seen: When the Voyager spacecraft flew by Neptune in 1989, it spotted similarly dark fountains on Neptune’s large moon Triton.

But it’s too soon to say what those spots actually are.

“We are in the most preliminary stages of our investigations,” Moore says. “We are acutely aware that jumping to conclusions comes with great peril.”

Other observations discussed by NASA on Friday include data on how Pluto’s atmosphere behaves. “The atmosphere is very symmetric on opposite sides of the planet,” said New Horizons team member Randy Gladstone, of the Southwest Research Institute.

Scientists didn’t know Pluto had an atmosphere until 1988, and since then have been trying to understand how the planet’s puffy shroud evolves over the world’s 248-year trip around the sun.

Early theories suggested the atmosphere would freeze out and collapse as Pluto got farther and farther from the sun. But so far, that doesn’t appear to be happening. Preliminary data suggests that it’s more of a sluggish, stagnant shroud than a roiling, turbulent cloud.

“A glimpse of the data eliminates some models that were contenders up until now,” says Gladstone.

Like Earth’s atmosphere, Pluto’s is primarily made of nitrogen, though there are also layers of methane and heavier hydrocarbons. It is less dense but more voluminous than Earth’s, rising about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) above the planet's surface. The bulk of Earth's atmosphere, in contrast, is concentrated in a veil just 60 miles thick (100 kilometers).

And unlike Earth's atmosphere, Pluto's is escaping—or wafting into space. In fact, the New Horizons began detecting nitrogen atoms from Pluto’s atmosphere five days earlier than anticipated.“That nitrogen atmosphere, because Pluto is so small, escapes directly into space,” says team member Fran Bagenal of the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Now, New Horizons has detected a long tail of charged particles streaming off of Pluto that have “been pulled away and carried away by the solar wind,” Bagenal says. Calculations suggest Pluto loses as much as 500 tons of nitrogen per hour, meaning it has lost as much as 9,000 feet of nitrogen over the course of its 4.6 billion-year history, Bagenal says. “That’s a substantial mountain of nitrogen ice that’s been removed.”