Google doodle honours NASA spacecrafts Pluto flyby

New Delhi: July 14, might be Bastille Day in France, but the whole world will be watching and waiting to find out if the New Horizons spacecraft successfully makes its long-awaited flyby of Pluto.

In honour of that interplanetary feat, Google has switched over to an adorable doodle that shows a small illustration of the probe spinning around Pluto to honour its groundbreaking journey. The Google Doodle has been created by Kevin Laughlin.

Pluto is the largest known object in the Kuiper belt, and the second-most massive known dwarf planet in the Solar System. It was discovered in 1930 and was considered the ninth planet from the Sun.

The unmanned spacecraft will have a close shave past Pluto on Tuesday, thereby allowing scientists a close glimpse of the dwarf planet’s surface for the first time.

But there were jitters on Monday as the $700 million spacecraft, called New Horizons, sped toward Pluto, the last undiscovered frontier in the solar system.

According to principal investigator Alan Stern, there is a one in 10,000 chance that the spacecraft could be lost in a collision with debris around Pluto, long considered the farthest planet from the sun until it was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006.

The closest approach is set for Tuesday at 7:49 am (1149 GMT), when the piano-sized spacecraft shaves by Pluto’s surface at a speed of 30,800 miles (49,570 kilometers) per hour.

The first spacecraft to visit an unexplored planet since the NASA Voyager missions of the 1970s will be busy snapping pictures and collecting data, and will phone home later.

“While I don’t lose sleep over this, the fact is, tomorrow evening is going to be a little bit of drama,” said Stern.

“Until we pass that point tomorrow evening we won’t really know with certainty that we cleared the system and that there were no debris strikes.”

Stern said experts have searched for potential debris and haven’t found any of concern.

But spaceflight is a risky business, and Stern described the Kuiper Belt, where Pluto resides on the edge of the solar system, as “more or less a shooting gallery, with lots of small primordial comets and other things much smaller than Pluto.”

Never before has a spacecraft ventured into the Kuiper Belt, and New Horizons has been on its way there for more than nine years – a journey of some three billion miles.

“We are flying into the unknown,” Stern said.

(With inputs from agencies)