{"id":16211,"date":"2015-07-09T01:15:26","date_gmt":"2015-07-08T17:15:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/back-in-action-new-horizons-returns-fresh-view-of-pluto\/"},"modified":"2015-07-09T01:15:26","modified_gmt":"2015-07-08T17:15:26","slug":"back-in-action-new-horizons-returns-fresh-view-of-pluto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/back-in-action-new-horizons-returns-fresh-view-of-pluto\/","title":{"rendered":"Back in action, New Horizons returns fresh view of Pluto"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"This
This image of Pluto from New Horizons\u2019 Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) was received on July 8, and has been combined with lower-resolution color information from the Ralph instrument. Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The New Horizons spacecraft speeding toward Pluto has returned a new image of the icy world lurking at the solar system\u2019s outer frontier \u2014 the first photo beamed back to Earth since the probe suspended science operations Saturday.<\/p>\n

The image from New Horizons\u2019 long-range telescopic camera shows Pluto\u2019s surface features sharpening into focus. A dark band stretching around Pluto\u2019s equator, nicknamed \u201cthe whale,\u201d and a large 1,200-mile (2,000-kilometer) diameter bright marking shaped like a heart are visible in the latest image.<\/p>\n

The probe\u2019s black-and-white Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, or LORRI, instrument captured the view just before 2300 GMT (7 p.m. EDT) on Tuesday. The images arrived on the ground on Wednesday after a four-and-a-half hour travel time from Pluto \u2014 3 billion miles from Earth.<\/p>\n

New Horizons was less than 5 million miles, or 8 million kilometers, from Pluto when it took the image, which shows Pluto\u2019s equator near the bottom of the disk and north pole in the upper part of the view.<\/p>\n

The spacecraft will see parts of the region observed in Tuesday\u2019s image when it flies closest to Pluto on July 14. Pluto\u2019s 6.4-day rotation period will bring the same part features back into view of New Horizons when it skims just 7,750 miles above the icy dwarf planet after a nine-year trip from Earth.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe next time we see this part of Pluto at closest approach, a portion of this region will be imaged at about 500 times better resolution than we see today,\u201d said Jeff Moore, New Horizons\u2019 geology, geophysics and imaging team leader from NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center. \u201cIt will be incredible!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"This
This raw image from New Horizons\u2019 LORRI camera taken July 7 shows Pluto and its moon Charon from a distance of nearly 5 million miles (8 million kilometers). Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

New Horizons resumed taking science data Tuesday, when it kicked off a pre-programmed command sequence governing the craft\u2019s operations until July 16. The Pluto encounter command load allowed New Horizons to pick up with its mission after the probe went into safe mode Saturday, halting observations for three days.<\/p>\n

The images will keep getting better until New Horizons goes silent July 13 to focus on science observations when its path nears Pluto, its largest moon Charon and four other small moons, according to Hal Weaver, New Horizons\u2019 project scientist from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt gets juicier and juicier,\u201d Weaver said in a status briefing Wednesday. \u201cThe science team is just drooling over these pictures.<\/p>\n

\u201cComing in from six days (out) to three days (out), you\u2019re doubling the resolution with four times as many pixels across the objects,\u201d Weaver said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to start to get more compositional information on Pluto and Charon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pluto\u2019s closest approach to Pluto occurs at 1149:57 GMT (7:49:57 a.m. EDT) on July 14.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t have any idea what to expect \u2014 hardly at all \u2014 and this is it,\u201d Weaver said. \u201cThis is our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Engineers expect to receive signals from New Horizons more than 13 hours later confirming the spacecraft \u2014 about the size of a baby grand piano \u2014 made it through the flyby. Then science data and imagery will begin to trickle to Earth, but scientists say Pluto\u2019s faraway distance means it will take until late 2016 for all of the observations make it back.<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This image of Pluto from New Horizons\u2019 Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) was received on July 8, and has been combined with lower-resolution color information from the Ralph instrument. Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI The New Horizons spacecraft speeding toward Pluto has returned a new image of the icy world lurking at the solar system\u2019s outer frontier \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1861,2174,2848,2612],"class_list":["post-16211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-jhuapl","tag-new-horizons","tag-pluto","tag-swri"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16211"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}