In the last mile of its 3,464-day journey and only ten days away from a historic rendezvous with the dwarf planet Pluto, the New Horizons probe experienced an anomaly on July 4 and prompted the on-board computer to switch to ‘safe mode’. The event caused a communications blackout between New Horizons and mission control at the Applied Physics Laboratory, Maryland, for 90 minutes on Saturday. Now, the probe is transmitting telemetry signals that will help scientists fix it – hopefully in time for its encounter with Pluto and its moons.
And until it’s fixed, science missions – including the detailed pictures it’s been taking of Pluto and Charon of late – will be on pause. Not surprisingly, the incident will have the scientists and engineers operating the probenervous. As Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator, said in June, “There’s only one Pluto flyby planned in all of history, and it’s happening next month!”
New Horizons was launched by NASA on January 19, 2006, with the primary objective of studying Pluto’s surface and atmosphere up-close, as well as observe its moons Charon, Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos. In order to reduce mission costs at the time of launch, New Horizons was not designed to land on Pluto but to fly by it at a distance of about 13,000 km. On planetary scales, that’s small and excellent enough to fetch the dwarf planet out of the blur.