NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft to Pluto Experiences Anomaly

In a mission update, NASA said the team lost contact with the piano-sized probe at 1:54 p.m. ET, when it had less than 12 million miles left in its 3 billion-mile journey to the dwarf planet.

“I’m pleased that our mission team quickly identified the problem and assured the health of the spacecraft”, NASA’s Director of Planetary Science Jim Green said in a statement. Now three billion miles from Earth, messages to and from New Horizons take about nine hours all told.

Nasa scientists were working yesterday to revive the New Horizons spacecraft after it suffered a computer malfunction just nine days before it was due to fly past Pluto. The scientists also fear that at its present unknown speed, the space craft can cross Pluto entirely without any intimation going back to NASA.

After giving us all a heart attack over the weekend, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft seems to be recovering.

One of the features of the program would override any attempt by the spacecraft to put itself into the automatic safe mode as it did on July 4. The probe will gather information not only from the planet, but from its complex system of moons, for which it has already offered some interesting data with ultra-long range photography.

NASA says the science lost as a result of the computer glitch and recovery will not impact the overall mission goals or next week’s flyby. However, the spacecraft’s systems have entered safe mode until mission engineers can diagnose the problem.

In the early afternoon on the 4th of July, as most Americans were on the verge of slipping into a food-induced nap, the New Horizons space probe went into a nap of its own.

Adding to the challenge of recovery is the spacecraft’s extreme distance from Earth.

The engineers concluded no hardware or software fault occurred and the spacecraft is expected to return to normal operations on Tuesday.

But with this latest development, new data, particularly for its upcoming July 14 mission, may not be collected at all.