from Hacker News

NASA’s New Horizons Plans July 7 Return to Normal Science Operations

by dgallagher on 7/6/15, 1:58 AM with 12 comments

• by BinaryIdiot on 7/6/15, 7:51 AM

  Ever since I was a wee kid I wondered what Pluto looked like. When the news came that there were issues with New Horizons just DAYS away from finally coming close to Pluto my heart sank.

  It's very good news to hear it's back and will be good for the fly-by. I'm so excited to finally see pictures up close to this planet / dwarf planet!

• by chasing on 7/6/15, 3:04 AM

  As someone who loses sleep whenever he submits an app update to the App Store, I can't even imagine... Good luck to everyone working on this mission -- it's an awesome one.

• by dang on 7/6/15, 4:48 AM

  Looks like this story supersedes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9834278, which was on the front page most of today.

• by sohkamyung on 7/7/15, 3:21 AM

  Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society has posted a summary of the press briefing held about the New Horizons Anomaly [ http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0706140... ]. Her summary:

  - The anomaly related to the main computer being asked to do two computationally intensive tasks at once, and they were more than the computer could handle, so New Horizons switched to the backup computer, entered safe mode, stopped science, and called for help from Earth.

  - On Earth, engineers quickly understood the problem.

  - It is not a problem that can happen during the encounter.

  - Mission leadership chose to suspend science activities to focus on recovery efforts.

  - Science activities will resume on July 7 at 9:45 PT / 12:45 ET / 16:45 UT, Earth received time (so, about 12:15 UT, spacecraft event time).

  - 30 planned science observations were lost between July 3 and 7, none of them required for the top-level science goals of the mission.

  - The anomaly is no reason to doubt that New Horizons will perform its encounter science as planned.

• by ForHackernews on 7/6/15, 12:47 PM

  Holy hell, talk about a high-stress debugging situation. And then you have to wait 9 hours to see if your fix actually worked...

• by GravityWell on 7/6/15, 3:56 AM

  Thank goodness! Looking forward to the Pluto close-ups, which will hopefully include the dark spots.

• by Figs on 7/6/15, 9:33 AM

  I'm getting a plain black page from this link in both Firefox and Chromium. For the people that the link works for -- is there anything else of interest in the post beyond what's in the title and the previous story posted earlier today?

• by ietzg on 7/6/15, 12:30 PM

  cause of the incident was a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence

  Concurrency problems?