After Anomaly Scare, NASA's Pluto Flyby Mission Plans Return To normal Operations

NASA introduced late Sunday EDT local time that mission controllers for its New Horizons spacecraft plan to return the probe to commonplace operations via July 7, or most effective every week upfront of its mission-crowning deliberate Pluto flyby.

The announcement followed a late July 4th acknowledgement that mission controllers and engineers that NASA had lost contact with the spacecraft for over an hour and twenty minutes and that the cause of the paradox used to be “being labored.”

however NASA now reports that the $ seven-hundred million nearly decade-outdated mission is still on course for its July 14 flyby. the gap agency reports that an investigation into why the spacecraft misplaced contact and entered “protected mode” concludes that “no hardware or software default came about on the spacecraft.”

They notice that “the underlying result in of the incident was a hard-to-observe timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence that befell all through an operation to organize for the shut flyby.” NASA says no such similar command sequences are scheduled for the rest of the Pluto stumble upon.

“I’m happy that our mission workforce fast recognized the problem and assured the health of the spacecraft,” Jim green, NASA’s Director of Planetary Science mentioned in a commentary. “Now – with Pluto in our points of interest – we’re on the verge of returning to customary operations and going for the gold.”

NASA reports that each the new Horizons mission science staff and Alan Stern, the mission’s principal Investigator, have concluded that any science observations misplaced all the way through the paradox recovery phase won’t bog down any main mission targets, with “minimal impact on lesser targets.”

“in the case of science, it won’t exchange an A-plus even into an A,” Stern noted in a statement.

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