NASA disclosed on July 7 that despite an anomaly encountered by New Horizons spacecraft on its flyby mission to Pluto, the spacecraft is back on track and is sending epic images of this planet, which is 3 billion miles away from Earth.
The anomaly occurred on July 4 prompting New Horizons into safe mode, but this was quickly resolved by NASA’s ground engineers. New Horizons spacecraft is expected to go close to Pluto on July 14, 2015.
Epic images of Pluto were captured by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) before the anomaly. There were 4 dark spots that have intrigued scientists. What can they be?
NASA stated on its website:
“The left image shows, on the right side of the disk, a large bright area on the hemisphere of Pluto that will be seen in close-up by New Horizons on July 14. The three images together show the full extent of a continuous swath of dark terrain that wraps around much of Pluto’s equatorial region. The western end of the swath (right image) breaks up into a series of striking dark regularly-spaced spots, each hundreds of miles in size, which were first detected in New Horizons images taken in late June.”
Here are more photos taken by NASA’s New Horizons.
