In their latest published update, NASA’s New Horizons teem announced that they have reestablished contact with the spacecraft. However, that does not mean that everything is going according to plan.
The spacecraft, which launched on January 19, 2006 has travelled three billion miles toward it’s final destination and is now less than 10 days travel away from Pluto. Yesterday at 1:54 PM eastern daylight time, NASA lost communications with the probe. Communications were regained less than two hours later at 3:15 PM through NASA’s Deep Space Network.
With the mission so close to success and the probe so far away, reestablishing communications is not enough to put anyone’s mind at ease. The loss of communication was due to an anomaly experienced by the spacecraft. The, still unidentified, anomaly caused New Horizons’ autonomous autopilot to switch from the primary to the backup computer.
One the switchover had been accomplished, the spacecraft began to send telemetry data back to NASA so that engineers could identify the problem. However, there is a 9-hour communications delay between NASA and the probe. In other words, it takes a message 4.5 hours to travel the 3 billion miles to the probe and another 4.5 hours for a response to travel back.
The New Horizons staff has assembled an Anomaly Review Board (ARB) to examine the data and lay out a recovery plan, designed to return the probe to its original flight path. Under a best case scenario recovery will only take a single day, but it could take up to several days, depending on the nature of the anomaly.
Until the recovery plan can be implemented, the spacecraft will be unable to collect or transmit science data. At such a critical juncture in the long mission, that is a considerable disappointment to NASA scientists and space watchers everywhere.
Whatever happens from this point, the New Horizons probe has already delivered the best images to date of tiny, cold, distant pluto. Originally dubbed “Planet X”, Pluto wasn’t discovered and confirmed until 1930. This presented a special challenge to NASA engineers because they weren’t sure exactly where Pluto would be when the probe arrived.
With a planet like Mars, scientists know where it will be on any given date because they have observed its orbit around the Sun numerous times. A year on Pluto is 247.68 Earth years long, which means that astronomers have observed it for less than half of a single orbit around the sun. New Horizons was launched with the knowledge that its trajectory would have to be adjusted several times during its journey.
Prior to the New Horizons mission, most of what was known about Pluto was based on its gravitational influence on other distant planets such as Neptune and Uranus. While Pluto is tiny compared to other planets, it is the largest object in the Kuiper belt, a vast expanse of objects left over from the formation of the solar system and a deeper understanding of the dwarf planet could lead to a better understanding of our own ancient history.
Further information about the New Horizons anomaly will be posted on the NASA website as they become available.
