Though it's 2 billion miles away and on the wrong side of the sun, NASA's New Horizons probe cast quite a shadow on 4th of July festivities. Just days from its rendezvous with Pluto, the spacecraft shut down, went into sleep mode, and briefly lost communication with ground control.
Exhale, it's all good. About an hour after the tiny probe went dark, NASA reestablished communications. And the agency knows what went wrong. New Horizon's central computer was gearing up for new observations while simultaneously compressing science it had already captured. All the activity overclocked its processor, so it went into sleep mode.
In other words, New Horizons got so excited it passed out. Don't feel bad, little guy, we've all had a 4th of July like that.
The probe's little nap interrupted some data collection. "We lost some Saturday science, and all the science for Sunday and Monday is lost," said Alan Stern, NASA's principal investigator for the New Horizons mission, during Monday conference call. What does all that lost science mean? Content-wise, it's some color imagery, some navigation data, atmospheric observations, and some spectroscopic measurements. In terms of total science, it's not really that big a deal, because the probe's observations are weighted based on how close they are made to the planet. "New Horizons is set to get about 100 times closer than right now," says Stern.
New Horizons was about 9 million miles from Pluto when the computer shut down. On July 14—if everything goes according to plan—the probe will pass within 7,800 miles of the dwarf planet. Stern and Co. are pretty sure New Horizons won't have another melt down between then and now. But if it does, at least it won't be casting a pall on any patriotically significant barbecues.
For the full story of New Horizons's trip to the solar system's edge, check out this killer video:
