NASA Probe Approaches Pluto. New Images

NASA and the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory are expecting better close ups as New Horizons closes in on Pluto after a nine year long odyssey through the Solar System.

The probe has always been barreling to the brownie globe along with its main celestial body overhead, Charon, ever since January 2006.

On July 14, New Horizons will pass by the planet. Mission managers have decided not to use the 2.1-meter New Horizons high-gain antenna as a forward-facing shield against minute dust particles that could damage critical components at its flyby velocity of about 31,000 miles per hour. So Pluto is Pluto, regardless of which mental box we try to make it fit.

Like NASA’s first Mariner, Pioneer and… The image shows the side of Pluto facing its moon, Charon that includes the whale-shaped feature across the equator. “Also puzzling is the longstanding and dramatic difference in the colors and appearance of Pluto compared to its darker and grayer moon Charon”. With any luck, New Horizons will stay in good health and Nasa will extend the mission, allowing scientists to observe other, less familiar objects further away than Pluto. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will fly by at its closest distance to Pluto at approximately 7:49 a.m., July 14, 2015. “We have a couple of opportunities to uplink those updated timing information as well as the most precise estimate that we have for Pluto’s orbit and it’s satellites to the spacecraft right before the closest approach”, said Holdridge. Kuiper Belt objects are likely to be relatively pristine planetary building blocks left over from the formation of the solar system. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is on track to sweep past Pluto next week despite hitting a “speed bump” that temporarily halted science collection.

Since Pluto and Charon rotate slowly (once every 6.4 days), all of the best fully-lit images will show the same hemisphere. On Pluto, exotic ices like frozen nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide have been found, while Charon’s surface is made of frozen water and ammonia compounds. “If it’s really densely covered with impact craters that would suggest whatever that event that formed it was fairly agent – toward the beginning of the history of the solar system”.

Beyond this, it will also provide details about the temperature on Pluto and the composition of its atmosphere, with help from MVIC and LEISA, imagers attached to New Horizons.