NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is all set for its first fly-by of the dwarf planet. With the fly-by, scientists will be able to have high resolution maps of the planetary system. Also, the team happily announced that the probe has switched to encounter mode.

The probe will continue to move forward on its predetermined course and on July 14 at 7:49 a.m. ET, it will come within 8,000 miles of the dwarf planet's surface. It will be there despite the fact that it suffers any problem like the one that happened on July 4.

Experts shared that if any problem takes place then the spacecraft has been programmed to reboot itself and continue with its tasks without the need of any involvement from Mission Control at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.

The spacecraft is almost 3 billion miles away from Earth. Being at such a great distance, it is very important it should have a level of autonomy. Experts said if the probe has to seek help from controllers then it will take 4.5 hours to send a distress call and another 4.5 hours to fix to be sent back from earth to the spacecraft.

It is a matter of celebration that the probe has switched to encounter mode because it means science observations are resuming. It is expected that soon new images of Pluto and its moons will be start appearing on the New Horizons LORRI image database.