Pluto Was Red All Along – RYOT News

For decades scientists have suspected that Pluto was a bit reddish but they weren’t really sure until NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft snapped shots of the dwarf planet from about 10 million miles away.

These are the most recent high-resolution views of Pluto sent by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, including one showing the four mysterious dark spots on Pluto that have captured the imagination of the world.

“I’m pleased that our mission team quickly identified the problem and assured the health of the spacecraft”, Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science division, said in the update. That represents about 30 observations out of 500 planned over the next week.

The investigation into the anomaly that caused New Horizons to enter safe mode on July 4 has confirmed that the main computer was overloaded due to a timing conflict in the spacecraft command sequence. “Now we’re eager to get back to the science and prepare for the payoff that’s yet to come”.

The left image shows, on the right side of the disk, a large bright area on the hemisphere of Pluto that will be seen close-up by New Horizons on July 14. No similar operations are planned for the remainder of the Pluto encounter. “Also puzzling is the longstanding and dramatic difference in the colors and appearance of Pluto compared to its darker and grayer moon Charon”.

New Horizons – about the size of a baby grand piano – was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2006.

If trouble occurs, the spacecraft is programmed to reboot itself and resume its tasks without intervention from Mission Control at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. The Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio, leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning.