What was so unusual about these 47 is that they’re not small enough to account for their dimness. In fact, many of them are roughly the size of our own Milky Way (ranging in diameter from 1.5 to 4.6 kiloparsecs, compared with the Milky Way’s roughly 3.6) but have only roughly one thousandth of the Milky Way’s stars. The authors of the recent study interpret this to mean that these galaxies must be even more dominated by dark matter than are ordinary galaxies.

New Horizons’ latest image of Pluto was taken on July 9, 2015 from 3.3 million miles (5.4 million kilometers) away, with a resolution of 17 miles (27 kilometers) per pixel. At this range, Pluto is beginning to reveal the first signs of discrete geologic features. This image views the side of Pluto that always faces its largest moon, Charon, and includes the so-called “tail” of the dark whale-shaped feature along its equator. (The immense, bright feature shaped like a heart had rotated from view when this image was captured.)

“Among the structures tentatively identified in this new image are what appear to be polygonal features; a complex band of terrain stretching east-northeast across the planet, approximately 1,000 miles long; and a complex region where bright terrains meet the dark terrains of the whale,” said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern. “After nine and a half years in flight, Pluto is well worth the wait.”

The team figured out what had gone wrong. The spacecraft’s main computer had been compressing new scientific data for downloading much later. At the same time, it was supposed to execute some previously uploaded commands. It got overloaded; the spacecraft has an “autonomy” system that can decide what to do if something’s not quite right. That system decided to switch from the main to the backup computer and go into safe mode.

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The APL team had to reconfigure New Horizons the way you would rouse a drunk on a Sunday morning to get him ready for church. This required many commands, everything made slower by the nine-hour round-trip communication challenge across the 3 billion miles of space.

The reddish materials that color Pluto are absent on Charon. Pluto has a significant atmosphere; Charon does not. On Pluto, exotic ices like frozen nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide have been found, while Charon’s surface is made of frozen water and ammonia compounds. The interior of Pluto is mostly rock, while Charon contains equal measures of rock and water ice.

“These two objects have been together for billions of years, in the same orbit, but they are totally different,” said Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado.

The scientists pointed NuSTAR at nine galaxies where supermassive black holes were thought to be extremely active but largely obscured. Five of these candidates were found to contain hidden supermassive black holes, feasting on surrounding material. What’s more, the objects were observed to be more active than previously thought.

Such observations were not possible before NuSTAR, which launched in 2012 and is able to detect much higher-energy X-rays than previous satellite observatories.

“Thanks to NuSTAR, for the first time, we have been able to clearly identify these hidden monsters that are predicted to be there, but have previously been elusive because of their surrounding cocoons of material,” said George Lansbury of Durham University, lead author of the findings accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

“Although we have only detected five of these hidden supermassive black holes, when we extrapolate our results across the whole universe, then the predicted numbers are huge and in agreement with what we would expect to see.”

The anomaly related to the main computer being asked to do two computationally intensive tasks at once, and they were more than the computer could handle, so New Horizons switched to the backup computer, entered safe mode, stopped science, and called for help from Earth.

A total of seven launch pads will be built at the new cosmodrome, if everything goes well Soyuz-2 launches are going to begin at LD1 this year. The Russian space agency has been posting photos of the future launch site of their rockets on their Facebook, Flickr and VK pages for a while, the following images show how the construction works proceed. 

The mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, lost contact with the unmanned spacecraft – now 10 days from arrival at Pluto – at 1:54 p.m. EDT, and regained communications with New Horizons at 3:15 p.m. EDT, through NASA’s Deep Space Network.

During that time the autonomous autopilot on board the spacecraft recognized a problem and – as it’s programmed to do in such a situation - switched from the main to the backup computer. The autopilot placed the spacecraft in “safe mode,” and commanded the backup computer to reinitiate communication with Earth. New Horizons then began to transmit telemetry to help engineers diagnose the problem.  

A New Horizons Anomaly Review Board (ARB) was convened at 4 p.m. EDT to gather information on the problem and initiate a recovery plan. The team is now working to return New Horizons to its original flight plan. Due to the 9-hour, round trip communication delay that results from operating a spacecraft almost 3 billion miles (4.9 billion kilometers) from Earth, full recovery is expected to take from one to several days; New Horizons will be temporarily unable to collect science data during that time.