TORONTO – After NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft went into safe mode on July 4, the space agency said that they expect normal operations to resume on Tuesday.
New Horizons is just days away from making its closest pass by Pluto, once considered our ninth planet.
However, the New Horizons team got a scare on Sunday when the spacecraft entered safe mode, essentially shutting down science operations.
READ MORE: Why you should get excited about the mission to Pluto
In a teleconference on Monday afternoon the New Horizons team explained why the spacecraft experienced the difficulty.
While loading up the command codes for the close encounter, which will take place from July 7 to 16, the team was also downloading compressed data in order to make room for the new data it would collect. Engineers had already uploaded the commands to the backup computer. However, the two tasks became more than the computer could handle and it switched to backup and went into safe mode.
After determining the cause, the team put a plan in place.
“New Horizons is operating flawlessly, on course and not only is it operating flawlessly but so are all the instruments in the payload,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator.
“Couldn’t be happier with what we’re seeing already from this great distance.”
Just after the teleconference, NASA released new images of Pluto.
The team doesn’t anticipate any further issues similar to the one that resulted in Sunday’s shut down of science operations.
About 30 observations were lost in the three-day shut down. But that’s a total of 496 operations between July 4 and end of close-approach, Stern said. Though it represents roughly six per cent of the total nine-day operations, Stern said that when it comes to the science gathered, it really is closer to one per cent, since most of the critical science observations will take place when the spacecraft is much closer to Pluto.
“This is a speed bump in terms of total return,” he said.
Normal operations are expected to resume on Tuesday after a decision was made to suspend all science operations in order to ensure the spacecraft would operate correctly. Stern said that there are no further threats to the upcoming encounter and that excitement continues to build.
“We came a long way to explore Pluto. And all the indications are, Pluto isn’t going to let us down.”
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