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The announcement followed a late July 4th acknowledgement that mission controllers and engineers that NASA had lost contact with the spacecraft for over an hour and twenty minutes and that the cause of the anomaly was “being worked.”
But NASA now reports that the $700 million nearly decade-old mission remains on track for its July 14 flyby. The space agency reports that an investigation into why the spacecraft lost contact and entered “safe mode” concludes that “no hardware or software default occurred on the spacecraft.”
They note that “the underlying cause of the incident was a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence that occurred during an operation to prepare for the close flyby.” NASA says no such similar command sequences are scheduled for the remainder of the Pluto encounter.
“I’m pleased that our mission team quickly identified the problem and assured the health of the spacecraft,” Jim Green, NASA’s Director of Planetary Science said in a statement. “Now – with Pluto in our sights – we’re on the verge of returning to normal operations and going for the gold.”
NASA reports that both the New Horizons mission science team and Alan Stern, the mission’s Principal Investigator, have concluded that any science observations lost during the anomaly recovery phase won’t hamper any primary mission objectives, with “minimal effect on lesser objectives.”
“In terms of science, it won’t change an A-plus even into an A,” Stern noted in a statement.
