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NASA's mission to Pluto lost contact with ground controllers http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2015/07/05/nasa-loses-contact-with-new-horizons-pluto-spacecraft-enters-safe-mode/ and went into "safe mode" when contact was re-established.
Ten days before NASA 's New Horizons spacecraft was due to make its closest approach to Pluto, the space agency reports that at 1:54 PM EDT on the afternoon of July 4th local U.S. time, it lost contact with the $700 million unmanned flyby mission for more than an hour and twenty minutes. Controllers were able to regain a signal from the probe via NASA's Deep Space Network at 3:15 PM. EDT, but as a result, the spacecraft's systems have entered safe mode until mission engineers can diagnose the problem.
Of course, New Horizons is way out there, which makes communications difficult.
Recovery from the event is inherently hamstrung due to the 9-hour, round trip communication delay that the agency says "results from operating a spacecraft almost 3 billion miles (4.9 billion kilometers) from Earth.
Fly-by is scheduled to take place on July 14th. Can't help but wonder if this is not revenge for being demoted to a dwarf planet.
Original Submission
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @11:57PM
Money that should be used to kill muslims. Aint no muslims in space. God Bless Obama.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @12:02AM
Is this a problem with the spacecraft or something going on closer to home? The pubmed website was down yesterday too. This is very rare.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @12:08AM
There must a conspiracy a foot!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @12:14AM
The submitter suggested an even more absurd explanation:
I don't see why my comment got criticized but that one didn't. Hopefully as more comments build up the theories will get less and less absurd, something I don't see you contributing to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @12:22AM
Pluto does not exist. It is a blemish on the celestial backdrop at the edge of the solar system. An ethereal mosquito tripped over the spacecraft but a helpful angel has righted it again. Continue believing there is a universe beyond the celestial backdrop. God would prefer His heavenly reality TV show to continue uninterrupted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @12:39AM
If I understand you correctly, two members of the New Horizons team use the handles "ethereal mosquito" and "helpful angel". Ethereal mosquito made some error sending a command which lead to disorientation of the craft and loss of contact with the Earth. Once this was realized, helpful angel transmitted the corrected code. That is much more reasonable.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday July 06 2015, @12:20AM
If they had to upload a new firmware image it could take a couple years. The link is very noisy so there is oodles if error correction. Its not like tcp where you retransmit if the checksum fails. You only get one chance so there are lots of error correction bits but that comes at the cost of reducing the rate of the payload data.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @12:30AM
the transmitter suffers a power cut when luddite terrorists blow up the power plant because they herd that nasa was inviting hungry aliens to a human buffet
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Monday July 06 2015, @01:39AM
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday July 06 2015, @03:05AM
I once allocated my firmware's memory in Excell. How much rsnge does that integer really need? 16 bits will do.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @01:13AM
Does anyone know of any images released more recent than these from July 1:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20150701-2 [jhuapl.edu]
The southern hemisphere looks extremely odd.
(Score: 1) by liquibyte on Monday July 06 2015, @01:28AM
According to https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html [nasa.gov] those seem to be the latest before going dark.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday July 06 2015, @03:56PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by liquibyte on Monday July 06 2015, @11:59PM
Hell, welcome to most of the internet. This is what you get from the latest generation of web monkeys, *shiny*.
(Score: 1) by liquibyte on Monday July 06 2015, @04:54AM
Looks like things will be getting back to normal on the 7th and pictures should start coming in shortly thereafter.
https://www.nasa.gov/nh/new-horizons-plans-july-7-return-to-normal-science-operations [nasa.gov]
kaszz's links are good stuff and Alan Stern himself posted in the thread http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=8047&st=180 [unmannedspaceflight.com] confirming there was nothing serious going on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @10:24AM
Thanks, I was worried we were having a 2001: Space Odyssey moment where the last transmission is of some mysterious phenomenon.
"The thing's hollow — it goes on forever — and — oh my God! — it's full of stars!"
(Score: 5, Informative) by gnuman on Monday July 06 2015, @01:29AM
You can check status of deep space network at,
https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html [nasa.gov]
It's communicating. What is amazing is how weak these signals are. Even transmitted signal is quite weak, considering local radio stations are using much more transmission power.
(Score: 4, Informative) by kaszz on Monday July 06 2015, @02:01AM
Posted 15-07-05 15:43 UTC: [soylentnews.org]
NASA says their New Horizons probe [wikipedia.org] suffered a temporary communication breakdown [discovery.com] on Saturday at 17:54 UTC, 10 days before it's supposed to fly past Pluto on 2015-07-14. The probe went into "safe mode" [planetary.org] but it will still fly past Pluto at the planned distance, speed, and time. The glitch may cause the approach animations and a gap in the light curves for Nix and Hydra. The mission team is working to restore communications to normal. "Full recovery is expected to take from one to several days," NASA wrote in a status report on Saturday. "New Horizons will be temporarily unable to collect science data during that time. The latency one way is currently 4.5 hours.
The two way communication progress can be seen here [nasa.gov] at the Canberra dish. There's a thread over at New Horizons Pluto System Encounter, 28 Jun 15 [unmannedspaceflight.com] that has some things to say about the issue.
Some close up pictures of the planet: dark band at the bottom is around the equator [unmannedspaceflight.com].
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 06 2015, @02:36AM
Blame Abbot (the aussie PM): the dark band is smoke coming from the nearby brown coal power stations in Victoria [soylentnews.org].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @02:39AM
Why is the price tag mentioned always mentioned in these stories. Ok, it is relevant when the project becomes official. Ok, it is relevant when the project is finished. It is ok when the project launches. Maybe I should ask, when does it become appropriate to stop mentioning it? If I publish a picture from one of the Ranger missions, do I say "here is a picture from the $10M Ranger 3 mission", or do I only mention the cost if the picture is crappy, thus somehow implying "look, the mission was $10M and look how crappy this picture is!!!!"
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 06 2015, @03:24AM
Professional envy, I guess
Because, you know, in the mind of the reporters the mission's objective is to take pictures for them to have something to report about; pretty much as their human counterparts - the photojournalists - do.
Except that neither reporters nor photojournalists receive a $700mils/mission to do it; so maybe it's a "heads should roll" type of thinking?
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @04:56AM
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 06 2015, @05:11AM
(inferring by the intellectual capabilities of some of them, we may see risen hands)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday July 06 2015, @03:58AM
Obligatory ahref=http://xkcd.com/1532/ [soylentnews.org]" rel="url2html-26778">http://xkcd.com/1532/> Xkcd.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday July 06 2015, @06:03AM
What the heck happened to my quite normal obligatory link to http://xkcd.com/1532/ [xkcd.com] ? Ah, the mysteries of rehash! It brings us unicode, it takes away html!
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @07:50AM
either that or you forgot a space between "a" and "href".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @05:12AM
> Recovery from the event is inherently hamstrung due to the 9-hour, round trip communication delay that the agency says "results from operating a spacecraft almost 3 billion miles (4.9 billion kilometers) from Earth.
Yeah, like those NASA bods are so lazy with this whole "finite speed of light" thing, can't they just fix the damn latency already?