Next week NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is prepared for a historic Pluto fly-by. The spacecraft has been reactivated by NASA's space center following a malfunction last weekend.
The fly by will take place on July 14, the 50th anniversary of Mariner 4's visit to Mars. At the time, the Mars space mission was the first successful planetary fly-by approach of any NASA's spaceship.
New Horizons has been travelling through space for the past nine years, after the spacecraft was launched on 19 January 2006. NASA's spacecraft passed Jupiter just over a year after launch. Besides making scientific observations, New Horizons used the giant planet's strong gravity force in order to increase its velocity. This boost in speed shortened the time to reach Pluto by years.
Just 10 days before the planned encounter with Pluto, last weekend the mission was suddenly cast into doubt. For about 90 minutes, the space center lost contact with the spacecraft. Ground controllers found that New Horizons had entered a low power sleep mode when communications were established.
The "safe mode" is designed to protect New Horizons when anything goes wrong during the space mission. It was concluded that the problem was due to an operator errors, asking the spaceship to perform too many things at once.
The multi-tasking has crashed the onboard computer of the space probe. Science and space exploring operations were resumed on 7 July and the space center will ensure this incident will not happen during the fly by itself.
Next week, on July 14, NASA probe is set for fly-past of Pluto, the frozen "dwarf planet" of your solar system. New Horizons will be, at closest approach, at 4.5 billion kilometers from Earth but less than 12,500 kilometers above the Pluto's icy surface. At that distance the radio connection is so weak that will pass more than one year for the data recorded by its instruments to arrive on Earth. However, the first close-up pictures of Pluto, the "dwarf planet" of our solar system, will be taken on 15 July.
Pluto is about two-thirds the size of the Earth's moon. Due to the vast distance between Earth and Pluto as well as the tiny size of the planet, even with the Hubble space telescope, we've never had a good look at it. Now, the fastest NASA spaceship is all set for epic encounter with Pluto, our remotest planet of the solar system. New Horizons is approaching the dwarf planet at 5,100 km/h. The robotic probe will fly past Pluto, but its board instrument and cameras and instruments will record scientific data and images of the "dwarf planet".
