
NASA’s New Horizons Plans July 7 Return to Normal Science Operations - dgallagher
http://www.nasa.gov/nh/new-horizons-plans-july-7-return-to-normal-science-operations
======
BinaryIdiot
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!

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

~~~
Bedon292
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.

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chasing
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.

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

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sohkamyung
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...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-
lakdawalla/2015/07061400-new-horizons-back-in-action.html) ]. 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.

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

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

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Figs
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?

~~~
r721
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...](http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-
Article.php?page=20150705)

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ietzg
_cause of the incident was a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft
command sequence_

Concurrency problems?

