NASA’s New Horizons Plans July 7 Return to Normal Science Operations | Hacker News Reader

NASA’s New Horizons Plans July 7 Return to Normal Science Operations

nasa.gov

76 pointsdgallagher12 comments

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!

You can already see some of the recent pictures they've taken here: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/index.php?page=1

Thanks! I already monitor a bunch of twitter accounts to see the latest but didn't think to look for a centralized place. Bookmarking!

That is an awesome link, thanks. It is really mind blowing to look at the target distance for each of them and see how fast it is approaching Pluto.

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.

Looks like this story supersedes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9834278, which was on the front page most of today.

Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society has posted a summary of the press briefing held about the New Horizons Anomaly [ http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0706140... ]. Her summary:

- 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.

Holy hell, talk about a high-stress debugging situation. And then you have to wait 9 hours to see if your fix actually worked...

Thank goodness! Looking forward to the Pluto close-ups, which will hopefully include the dark spots.

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 key paragraph is as follows:

"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."

Also, try this link (content is same): http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20...

cause of the incident was a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence

Concurrency problems?

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