http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/04/nasa-probe-new-horizons-pluto-charon 10 days and counting! I for one am absolutely thrilled for this. I have been counting down the years, months, and days for this ever since it launched back in 2006. I find it super exciting that we will finally see what the Plutonian system looks like up close. I am equally excited to see what we will discover in the Keiper belt and beyond. These are truly exciting times for Astronomy fans indeed. I find it absolutely fascinating that space is so vast that we are just now, in 2015, having a probe arrive at what was considered our 9th planet for all those years. I am sure there will be even more discoveries in the space beyond Pluto. Next up will hopefully be the James Webb telescope getting launched. THAT is going to be amazing.
I'm interested, but I wasn't even counting, and now the day that Pluto finally reveals itself has snuck up on me and will soon arrive. Cool! Just a few more days now.
Oh no! The New Horizon probe unexpectedly shut down and the mission is at risk. Now it's a race against time to get it up and running again in time to meet up with Pluto. Something 'scary' went wrong with NASA's probe to Pluto
NO!!! You have seriously got to be kidding me....I really hope this data wasn't lost....New Horizons has been on course for 9 years and she starts acting up 9 days before arriving to Pluto... I really hope this works out, I have literally been looking forward to July 14th for the past decade...They say they can get it working again in a few days but I just hope it gets working before reaching Pluto. It was never designed to stay in Pluto's orbit it's going to do a flyby on the way to the Keiper Belt and beyond. It can't stop and hang around Pluto it wasn't designed to do that. I will be extremely disappointed if it sails right past Pluto without ever getting up close pictures of the damn thing... Fingers are crossed...
I wanted to get a closer look at those brilliant bright spots on Ceres. They looked like they did not belong there, and we were supposed to get a much closer look at them, but I never saw those photos taken when we got much closer. Oops just realized this is a different mission than mentioned in the op. Sorry bout that.
What's a few billion miles between friends? I'll be disappointed if we miss Pluto, but I really want to see the Kuiper belt. There are just so many mysteries we know of out there, and I'm convinced we'll find many more.
Okay you can all breath a sigh of relief. The probe is up and running again right now and it's expected to work through the Pluto flyby. New Horizons spacecraft back to normal after suffering terrifying glitch this weekend
And today we get a nice belated Valentine from Pluto! http://rt.com/news/272686-pluto-image-heart-nasa Pluto has a huge heart as revealed in a new and the most detailed image of Pluto ever, received from NASAs New Horizons spacecraft as the flyby sequence of science observations has got officially underway. The US space agency said scientists received this stunning view of Pluto in the early hours of July 8. It said the image, snapped by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), was taken the day before, when the spacecraft was less than 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) from Pluto. According to NASA, it's the first image to be received since the July 4 anomaly, which had sent the spacecraft into safe mode. The view is mainly focused on the area that will be seen in close-up during New Horizons July 14 (Bastille Day). This side of Pluto is dominated by three broad regions of varying brightness. Most prominent are an elongated dark feature at the equator, informally known as the whale, and a large heart-shaped bright area measuring some 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) across on the right. Above those features is a polar region that is intermediate in brightness, the agency explained. Jeff Moore, geologist, geophysicist and imaging team leader of NASAs Ames Research Center, has promised that the next time scientists get to see this part of Pluto a portion of this region will be imaged at about 500 times better resolution than we see today. It will be incredible! he said.
