New Horizon has mapped a nine year and 3 billion mile journey.
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“We’re on to Pluto!”
“I’m pleased that our mission team quickly identified the problem and assured the health of the spacecraft“, Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science division, said in the update.
This week’s Big Picture Science is a special episode devoted to Pluto and New Horizons – “Dogged Pursuit of Pluto”. The spacecraft will come within 7,750 miles of the mysterious, tiny, icy world out on the fringes of the solar system.
The quick response to the weekend computer glitch assures that the mission remains on track to conduct the entire close flyby sequence as planned, including the July 14 flyby observations of Pluto.
“In terms of science, it won’t change an A-plus even into an A”, New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in the update. “Also puzzling is the longstanding and dramatic difference in the colors and appearance of Pluto compared to its darker and grayer moon Charon”. The main computer was multi-tasking in preparation for the big event coming up – and dealing with heavier, more complex data loads than expected – when the trouble arose.
NASA’s worst fears were allayed once the space agency realized that the craft had merely reverted to “safe mode” status after receiving instructions to do two contradictory things at once.
New Horizons blasted into space atop an Atlas V rocket in January 2006.
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The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. In the actual procedure, New Horizons damage off programming communications technology and stopped technology processes.
