NASA confirmed Tuesday, July 14 evening the mission success of its New Horizons probe, who had managed to get very close to Pluto earlier in the day and collecting a lot of data that will know more about this planet.
The probe, which is passed only 12 400 km of Pluto after traveling for nine years and 5 billion kilometers, sent a confirming message she had managed to approach safely to the dwarf planet. “We have received telemetry sent by the probe” , said from central command Laurel (Maryland, is) Alice Bowman, the project leader, triggering an explosion of joy among his colleagues .
US President Barack Obama also acknowledged the work of NASA
Even if the collision risk was low. – estimated two out of 10 000 – the technicians of US space agency expected that “call home” forward because it confirms that all is well and that scientific data have been gathered on schedule
Read:. Pluto as never seen
New Horizons is the fastest probe sent by man in space: it was close to Pluto over 49 000 km / h and this speed one collision with debris the size of a grain of rice could be catastrophic.
During a window of a few hours New Horizons has stored up pictures and information about Pluto, which is knows yet little: the probe was fully configured to perform this data collection and could not communicate simultaneously with Earth technicians. She interrupted only a few minutes to 22 h 30 French time 15 minutes to send telemetry data. More than four hours were needed for these data sent from the confines of our solar system to manage NASA technicians.
The received data showed that the probe is still in perfect condition and that it thus normally able to complete its abundant data collection. She will start sending these precious materials that will answer many questions about Pluto from Wednesdays. It will have a total of 16 months to transmit all the data it has collected during his historical overview of the dwarf planet.
New Horizons continues to present its road to observe the Kuiper Belt, a large pile of debris beyond the orbit of Neptune.
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