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BREAK Glitch halts New Horizons operations as it nears Pluto

Journal by kaszz

NASA says their New Horizons probe suffered a temporary communication breakdown 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" 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 at the Canberra dish. There's a thread over at New Horizons Pluto System Encounter, 28 Jun 15 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.

BREAK Glitch halts New Horizons operations as it nears Pluto | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 3 comments | Search Discussion
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday July 05 2015, @03:58PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Sunday July 05 2015, @03:58PM (#205299) Journal

    The story comes out at 07/05 23:52. If it's 9 hours for two-way communication with New Horizons, waiting that long for the story should be fine ;-)

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    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday July 05 2015, @04:37PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Sunday July 05 2015, @04:37PM (#205311) Journal

      planetary.org says "an anomaly the afternoon of July 4 that led to a loss of communication" and then says nasa.gov says: "lost contact with the unmanned spacecraft -- now 10 days from arrival at Pluto -- at 1:54 p.m. EDT". So the story came out on 4th July?

      planetary.org article is dated 04-07-2015 23:10 CDT. But doesn't say if it's Australian CDT or North American CDT, I'll assume it's the latter.

      • (Score: 2) by fliptop on Sunday July 05 2015, @05:24PM

        by fliptop (1666) on Sunday July 05 2015, @05:24PM (#205325) Journal

        Apparently everything is ok [nasa.gov]:

        The New Horizons spacecraft experienced an anomaly the afternoon of July 4 that led to a loss of communication with Earth. Communication has since been reestablished and the spacecraft is healthy.

        ...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.

        Last Updated: July 5, 2015

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