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New Horizons Exits Safe Mode, Operating Flawlessly for Upcoming Pluto Encounter
Latest color image of Pluto taken on July 3, 2015 shows 4 mysterious dark spots.
Best yet image of Pluto was taken by the LORRI imager on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on July 3, 2015 at a distance of 7.8 million mi (12.5 million km, just prior to the July 4 anomaly that sent New Horizons into safe mode. Color data taken from the Ralph instrument gathered earlier in the mission. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
Despite some hair-raising and unplanned 4th of July fireworks of sorts in deep space which caused NASA’s Pluto bound New Horizons spacecraft to enter “safe mode” due to a computer glitch and temporarily halt all science operations over the weekend, the spacecraft is now fully back on track, “healthy” and working “flawlessly” and set to resume all planned research investigations on Tuesday, July 7, NASA and top mission managers announced at a media briefing held this afternoon, Monday, July 6.
It’s now just exactly one week before the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a fast flyby encounter of the ever intriguing binary planet, And the great news could not come soon enough given the proximity of the flyby.(…)
Read the rest of New Horizons Exits Safe Mode, Operating Flawlessly for Upcoming Pluto Encounter (946 words)
© Ken Kremer for Universe Today, 2015. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: Alan Stern, binary planet, Charon, double planet, JHUAPL, Jim Green, last unexplored planet, lorri, NASA, New Horizons, Pluto, Pluto System, Ralph, Ralph and Alice, Solar System
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Source: http://www.universetoday.com/121236/new-horizons-exits-safe-mode-operating-flawlessly-for-upcoming-pluto-encounter/
