Ever since I was a wee kid I wondered what Pluto looked like. When the news came that there were issues with New Horizons just DAYS away from finally coming close to Pluto my heart sank.
It's very good news to hear it's back and will be good for the fly-by. I'm so excited to finally see pictures up close to this planet / dwarf planet!
As someone who loses sleep whenever he submits an app update to the App Store, I can't even imagine... Good luck to everyone working on this mission -- it's an awesome one.
- The anomaly related to the main computer being asked to do two computationally intensive tasks at once, and they were more than the computer could handle, so New Horizons switched to the backup computer, entered safe mode, stopped science, and called for help from Earth.
- On Earth, engineers quickly understood the problem.
- It is not a problem that can happen during the encounter.
- Mission leadership chose to suspend science activities to focus on recovery efforts.
- Science activities will resume on July 7 at 9:45 PT / 12:45 ET / 16:45 UT, Earth received time (so, about 12:15 UT, spacecraft event time).
- 30 planned science observations were lost between July 3 and 7, none of them required for the top-level science goals of the mission.
- The anomaly is no reason to doubt that New Horizons will perform its encounter science as planned.
I'm getting a plain black page from this link in both Firefox and Chromium. For the people that the link works for -- is there anything else of interest in the post beyond what's in the title and the previous story posted earlier today?
"The investigation into the anomaly that caused New Horizons to enter “safe mode” on July 4 has concluded that no hardware or software fault occurred on the spacecraft. The underlying cause of the incident was a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence that occurred during an operation to prepare for the close flyby. No similar operations are planned for the remainder of the Pluto encounter."
It's very good news to hear it's back and will be good for the fly-by. I'm so excited to finally see pictures up close to this planet / dwarf planet!