The probe has been barreling toward an unexplored and recently discovered outer section of the solar system for more than nine years, aiming for a close pass by the Kuiper Belt planet Pluto on July 14.
Ground control teams over the weekend were beginning to upload the final batch of instructions for the flyby when New Horizons’ primary computer shut down on Saturday afternoon. During its automated switch to its backup computer, New Horizons dropped radio communications with Earth for a tense 81 minutes.
The glitch suspended science operations, which have been ongoing since January.
NASA expects it will take until Tuesday for New Horizons to return to full service.
The cause of the glitch was “a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence that occurred during an operation to prepare for the close flyby,” NASA wrote in a status report.
With New Horizons nearly 3 billion miles from Earth, round-trip radio communications take about nine hours, complicating engineers’ attempts to find and fix the problem.
No impact to New Horizons’ flyby of Pluto are expected and science observations lost during the shutdown and recovery do not affect any primary objectives of the mission, NASA added.
“We’re on the verge of returning to normal operations,” Jim Green, NASA’s director of planetary science, said in the statement.
From Discovery News
No comments:
Post a Comment