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It’s now just exactly one week before the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a fast flyby encounter of the ever intriguing binary planet, And the great news could not come soon enough given the proximity of the flyby. “The spacecraft is in excellent health and back in operation. New Horizons is barreling towards the Pluto system,” stated Jim Green, director of Planetary Science, NASA Headquarters, Washington, at the start of the today’s news media briefing. The mission remains on track to conduct the complex close flyby science sequence in its entirety, as planned over the next week, including the July 14 flyby...

At last, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is sending back images of Pluto that look (slightly) better than brown blobs or pixel art. The probe has delivered a new batch of images from between 7.8 million to 9.2 million miles away, or close enough that the dwarf planet is starting to reveal some meaningful detail. There's still no explanation for those giant spots, but it's evident that there's a "continuous swath" of dark ground near the equator. And if you'd like pictures that are better than fuzzy, you might not have to hold out for too much longer. New Horizons...

NASA’s New Horizons mission is returning to normal science operations after a July 4 anomaly and remains on track for its July 14 flyby of Pluto. The investigation into the anomaly that caused New Horizons to enter “safe mode” on July 4 has concluded that no hardware or software fault occurred on the spacecraft. The underlying cause of the incident was a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence that occurred during an operation to prepare for the close flyby. No similar operations are planned for the remainder of the Pluto encounter. “I’m pleased that our mission team quickly...

At 1:54 p.m. EDT, communications suddenly stopped and weren’t reestablished until 3:15 p.m. through NASA’s Deep Space Network. During the time it was out of contact with mission control, the spacecraft’s autonomous autopilot recognized the problem and did what it was programmed to do, switching from the main to the backup computer, according to NASA officials. The autopilot then commanded the backup computer to put New Horizons in “safe mode” — where all non-essential functions are shut down — and reinitiate communications with Earth ... New Horizons is presently almost 3 billion miles (4.9 billion km) from Earth. Due to...

NASA said its New Horizons probe suffered a temporary communication breakdown on Saturday, 10 days before it's scheduled to fly past Pluto, and the mission team is working to restore normal operations. In a mission update, NASA said the team lost contact with the piano-sized probe at 1:54 p.m. ET, when it had less than 7.5 million miles left in its 3 billion-mile journey to the dwarf planet. The spacecraft's autopilot system switched control from its primary to its backup computer and restored communications at 3:15 p.m., NASA said. There's one big complication: Because New Horizons is so far away,...

On Mars, iron oxide or rust colors the planet’s soil, while Pluto’s coloration is likely caused by hydrocarbon molecules called tholins that are formed when cosmic rays and solar ultraviolet light interact with methane in Pluto’s atmosphere and on its surface. Airborne tholins fall out of the atmosphere and coat the surface with a reddish gunk ... “Pluto’s reddish color has been known for decades, but New Horizons is now allowing us to correlate the color of different places on the surface with their geology and soon, with their compositions,” said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest...

Go to http://eyes.nasa.gov/ and choose "Eyes on Pluto"

What to expect when you're expecting a flyby: Planning your July around New Horizons' Pluto Pictures (version 2) Posted By Emily Lakdawalla Wed Jun 24 2015 12:57:00 GMT-0700 (Pacific Standard Time) Topics: New Horizons, Pluto, Charon, mission status New Horizons is getting close to Pluto. Pluto and Charon have enlarged from featureless dots into worlds. Pluto's surface clearly bears streaks and splotches, while Charon is beginning to show the first hints of discernible features. Excitement is building for flyby day, July 14!Key places to watch for New Horizons information: Twitter: @NASANewHorizons (official NASA feed) and @NewHorizons2015 (run by principal investigator...

This is the first movie created by New Horizons to reveal color surface features of Pluto and its largest moon Charon. “It’s a bit unusual to see so much surface detail at this distance,” said New Horizons co-investigator William McKinnon of the Geology and Geophysics Investigation Team, Washington University in Saint Louis. “What’s especially noteworthy is the level of detail in both bodies. It’s certainly whetting our appetite for what’s to come.” The images were taken between June 23 and June 29, 2015, as New Horizons’ distance to Pluto decreased from a distance of 15 million to 11 million...

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is getting a final “all clear” as it speeds closer to its historic July 14 flyby of Pluto and the dwarf planet’s five moons. After seven weeks of detailed searches for dust clouds, rings, and other potential hazards, the New Horizons team has decided the spacecraft will remain on its original path through the Pluto system instead of making a late course correction to detour around any hazards. Because New Horizons is traveling at 30,800 mph (49,600 kph), a particle as small as a grain of rice could be lethal. “We’re breathing a collective sigh of...

New color images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft show two very different faces of the mysterious dwarf planet, one with a series of intriguing spots along the equator that are evenly spaced. Each of the spots is about 300 miles in diameter, with a surface area that’s roughly the size of the state of Missouri. Scientists have yet to see anything quite like the dark spots; their presence has piqued the interest of the New Horizons science team, due to the remarkable consistency in their spacing and size. While the origin of the spots is a mystery for now, the...

You’re probably as eager as I am for new images of Pluto and Ceres as both New Horizons and Dawn push ever closer to their respective little worlds. Recent photos, of which there are only a few, reveal some wild new features including what appears to a large crater on Pluto. In the end, this apparent large impact might only be a contrast effect or worse, an artifact of over-processing, but there’s no denying its strong resemblance to foreshortened, shadow-filled craters seen on the Moon and other moons. It’s also encouraging that an earlier photo from June 27 shows the...

Humanity has looked up to the "Man in the Moon" for millennia, but this could be one of our first views of the "Person in Pluto." The views are getting better and better as NASA's New Horizons spacecraft approaches Pluto for its July 14 flyby — and the pictures have begun revealing surface details. Ian Regan, an image-processing enthusiast from Plymouth, England, combined four images from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager with color data from the probe's Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera to produce an eerie colorized view of Pluto and its biggest moon, Charon.

Explanation: In three weeks, the robotic New Horizons spacecraft will reach Pluto. As the featured video makes clear, though, humanity has been on an unprecedented epoch of robotic exploration of our Solar System's planets for the past half century. The video highlights artistic illustrations of Mariner 2 flying by Venus in 1962, Mariner 4 flying past Mars in 1965, Pioneer 10 flying past Jupiter in 1973, Mariner 10 flying past Mercury in 1974, Pioneer 11 flying past Saturn in 1979, and Voyager 2 flying past Uranus in 1986 and then Neptune in 1989. Next is a hypothetical sequence depicting New...

In July, New Horizons crosses the next great frontier in our solar system. Mankind is about to visit one of the strangest places in our solar system. Out beyond Neptune, the Kuiper belt is home to hordes of cold, lumpy worlds -- some of which are large enough to have their own moons, but none of which we've seen up-close before. That's going to change this summer, when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flies by "the king of the Kuiper belt": Pluto. It's no longer considered a planet, but Pluto is still an important member of our solar system, and one...

Visit another world without ever leaving your yard. A NASA website gives you the time of day when light on Earth is the same as you would see on Pluto.You can't fly to Pluto. You will never have the opportunity to set foot on its inhospitable surface. It took NASA's New Horizons spacecraft over nine years just to get close. Don't let this deter you from experiencing a little bit of Pluto back here on Earth. NASA has unveiled a "Pluto Time" website that helps space fans replicate the light conditions on the dwarf planet from any location in the...

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is still 24 million miles and more than a month away from the dwarf planet Pluto, but the probe's pictures are already revealing a world that's more complicated than previously thought. "They show an increasingly complex surface with clear evidence of discrete equatorial bright and dark regions — some that may also have variations in brightness," the mission's principal investigator, Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, said Thursday in an image advisory. "We can also see that every face of Pluto is different, and that Pluto's northern hemisphere displays substantial dark terrains." The brightest as...

Pluto is undergoing global warming, researchers find October 9, 2002 BIRMINGHAM, Ala.--Pluto is undergoing global warming, as evidenced by a three-fold increase in the planet's atmospheric pressure during the past 14 years, a team of astronomers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Williams College, the University of Hawaii, Lowell Observatory and Cornell University announced in a press conference today at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's (AAS) Division for Planetary Sciences in Birmingham, AL. The team, led by James Elliot, professor of planetary astronomy at MIT and director of MIT's Wallace Observatory, made this finding by watching the...