NASA scientists are thrilled about their scheduled Pluto flyby on July 14 following a malfunction of New Horizon spacecraft last weekend.
New Horizons will be at its closest point to Pluto next Tuesday morning, making it the first time humankind has explored this part of the solar system in such detail.
Pluto is more than 4.5 billion kilometers away from Earth. Scientists are excited about the mission, because they know so little about the dwarf planet. Alan Stern from the New Horizons Program said nearly every discovery will be a surprise, and we will write the text books from scratch.
New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006, and has been travelling through space for the past nine years. Last weekend, just 10 days before the encounter, NASA was on edge as scientists lost contact with the spacecraft for roughly 90 minutes.
The problem was diagnosed as an operator error, in which the ground staff had asked the spacecraft to do too many things at once, crashing the onboard computer. NASA is confident this will not happen during the flyby itself, and the mission resumed on July 7.
New Horizons will not go into orbit around Pluto but fly by it. At its closest approach the spacecraft will be less than 12,500 km above the planet’s icy surface. Alan Stern said if the conditions are right, people living in New York City would be able to observe the encounter.
