As recent events have reminded us, space is hard. NASA had quite the scare of the weekend that looked at first like yet another reminder of this inescapable fact. The New Horizons probe, which is just days away from its rendezvous with Pluto, suddenly lost contact with mission control. After a gut-wrenching hour of waiting, the probe came back online, but what happened? NASA is putting all the pieces together, but it looks like everything is going to be okay.
New Horizons was launched nearly a decade ago on a mission to study the planet Pluto. Yes, it was still a planet when New Horizons launched. Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet several months later, but that doesn’t make the mission any less important. Pluto is still the first ever discovered Kuiper Belt object and its (relatively) large size compared to other objects in that region of space means that it has a system of small moons. It’s a perfect place to gather lots of data in a single mission.
NASA designed this mission to be a flyby, meaning New Horizons won’t get into orbit around Pluto. That’s why the possible failure over the weekend was so frightening for scientists. There’s a limited window of time for mission objectives to be carried out because New Horizons won’t be in the neighborhood for long. There’s no time to attempt a remote fix on the probe since it won’t be just sitting out there in orbit of Pluto indefinitely.
The problem occurred on Saturday afternoon (4th of July) when NASA was executing a simple operation to prepare New Horizons for its flyby. The probe dropped offline and was gone for an hour, and it’s almost 5 light-hours away. That means nearly half a day for a single round-trip signal between Earth and the probe. There was no time to start pinging the probe, so NASA waited to see if it came back, and indeed it did — in safe mode. It can’t operate any instruments to gather data in safe mode, So NASA needed to figure out what happened.
According to the last update from the space agency, the error was caused by a “hard-to-detect timing flaw” in the spacecraft’s operational software. The good news is going into safe mode and reestablishing contact with mission control is exactly what it’s supposed to do in this situation. Luckily, no more operations like the one that caused the crash are scheduled during the mission.
The next step is to bring the probe fully back online and exit safe mode. That’s scheduled to take place tomorrow (July 7th) due to the amount of time it takes for signals to reach the probe. NASA expects everything to come back online without issue and be ready for the July 14th Pluto flyby. It’s already getting very close — check out the true color GIF of Pluto and its largest moon Charon above. Images from New Horizons are already providing some of the clearest shots we’ve ever had of the dwarf planet’s surface and are expected to answer questions about the composition and surface elements present on Pluto, Charon, and possibly some of the moons.
