NASA Spacecraft Exploring Pluto | WJBF-TV

The switch also means that science observations are resuming, and it should not be long before fresh images of the dwarf planet and its entourage of moons starts popping up again. “In that same time, our unmanned space missions have been even more successful, and the New Horizons probe’s flyby of Pluto is as good an example as any of the United States leading the exploration of our solar system”.

Pluto may be three billion miles away, but we can still imagine what it’d be like to stand on the icy dwarf world’s surface.

The latest updates are from a map released by Nasa that provides tools to work out the finer details of Pluto’s unusual bright and dark markings. Scientists at NASA’s Planetary Science division initially feared that the spacecraft, which was launched in 2006 and has traveled millions of miles to the edge of the solar system, had met with a catastrophic end by colliding with something.

Over towards the east is spotty terrain that has gained the most attention to date. Each of the spots is about 300 miles (480 kilometers) in diameter, with a surface area that’s roughly the size of the state of Missouri. It could be a volcano or an impact crater.

One day after officially announcing correction of the problem and resumption of all science activities, the New Horizons team celebrated the beginning of its encounter mode. When Dawn turned on its ion engines, the probe detected a glitch in the software that controls its orientation. They are confident that this error would not repeat itself over the following historic days of the probe.

The flyby occurs on the 50th anniversary of the first successful American pass of Mars by the Mariner 4 spacecraft. In August of that same year, the worldwide Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet. It is expected that the pictures at that point will be very sharp and show targets on the surface of 2,300 km wide body with resolution greater than 100m per pixel.

Those lost observations, Stern said, account for about six percent of the overall observations New Horizons planned to take between July 4 and 16.

It is likely to take 16 months to play back every piece of science acquired over the next week. That’s even more impressive when you consider that, in addition to all of the usual perils of space, there was a glitch on the craft over the holiday weekend that had people anxious the New Horizon had come so far only to fail.