For
most of the country July 4th
means putting out our American Flags, getting our barbecues ready and
planning a fireworks display. For the people at Command Central at
Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel,
Maryland the day took on a whole new meaning when they lost
communication with the New Horizon spacecraft. The outage only lasted
1 hour and 21 minutes before communication was restored.
"I'm
pleased that our mission team quickly identified the problem and
assured the health of the spacecraft," said Jim Green, NASA's
Director of Planetary Science. "Now — with Pluto in our sights
— we're on the verge of returning to normal operations and going
for the gold."
Even though
communication have been restored there is still one problem. The
program glitch thatMe caused the communication breakdown also caused
the craft to go into “safe mode”. This means that just as with
your computer operating system when it goes into “safe mode” it
only runs the bare essentials to keep the system running. Meaning
that since the craft is only running what is needed for operation and
communication it is not running the external data collectors that
would normally be gathering the data NASA was hoping to collect.
"I'll
willingly admit that I freaked out, just a little bit, when I first
heard this news," The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla
said. "But I have confidence that the team will handle it and
will return the mission to normal operations with no serious loss to
science.”
Just
how long it will take to fix this glitch to get the craft off of
“safe mode” is not exactly known. Since it will take almost 9
hours for any communications to make the roughly 3 billion miles to
the New Horizon spacecraft and back to Earth. Whether it will take
one such communication or more to solve the glitch could mean the
difference between one day or several days of lost data. Either way
the spacecraft will still make a flyby of the draft planet Pluto on
July 15.
Other
articles on this topic:
No comments:
Post a Comment