MEXICO: NASA said it expects the New Horizons spacecraft to be back in service on Tuesday after a computer crash over the weekend threatened its upcoming historic flyby of Pluto.
Nearing the end of a 9.5-year journey to the solar system’s unexplored outer reaches, New Horizons shut down radio communications with Earth for a nail-biting 81 minutes on Saturday.
Ground controllers accidentally overloaded the spacecraft’s primary computer, which was attempting to compress data to free up memory while simultaneously installing the operating sequence for the Pluto encounter on its flash drive, New Horizons project manager Glen Fountain told reporters on a conference call.
New Horizons main computer crashed, triggering a switch to its backup computer while it awaited further instructions from ground controllers. In the process, New Horizons broke off radio communications and suspended science operations.
Engineers quickly tracked down the problem and hustled through procedures to prepare New Horizons for its one-shot close encounter with Pluto on July 14.
The small probe does not carry the massive amount of propellant needed to trim its speed and drop into orbit around Pluto, a small world circling in the Kuiper Belt region of the solar system.
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