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Glitch Halts New Horizons Operations As It Nears Pluto
An anonymous reader writes: NASA says their New Horizons probe suffered a temporary communication breakdown on Saturday, 10 days before it's supposed to fly past Pluto. The mission team is working to restore normal communications. "Full recovery is expected to take from one to several days," NASA wrote in a status report on Saturday. "New Horizons will be temporarily unable to collect science data during that time."
This has been going so well for such a long time. It will be absolutely heartbreaking if the probe is incapacitated just during the flyby window.
They need time to blur out pics of ET. :-D
The “encounter program” includes software to prohibit the very type of automated safe mode that New Horizons executed Saturday afternoon.
“Encounter mode short-circuits the on board intelligent autopilot so that if something goes wrong, instead of calling home for help, which is what most spacecraft do and what New Horizons does during cruise flight, it will just stay on the timeline. It will try to fix the problem, but it will rejoin the timeline because if it ‘went fetal,’ as we say, if it just called home for help, it could miss the flyby,” New Horizons lead scientist Alan Stern told Discovery News before Saturday’s problem.
Can anyone translate the bolded part into caveman-lish for me?
Since they only have one shot at the flyby, the New Horizons web site states that the encounter sequence they are uploading will disable the safe mode and instruct the probe to return to the timeline sequence.
SHIT!!
Link
Alan Stern is the director of the New Horizons mission. So no worries. :) You can see that two way communication is in progress here at the Canberra dish.
This was a really minor glitch and will have no impact on the mission as a whole. There weren't even any significant observations planned for today.
(As a side note, the closer we get to Pluto and the more we see of it (dark band at the bottom is around the equator), the more it's starting to remind me of an airless Titan :) )
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
Java update.
I want to see this probe make good as much as any, but they posted a very clear letter stating they are having problems. It's very sad that they're missing out on so much stuff. Each lost second is priceless here.
Must be terrible for the team.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20150704
Sad july 4th th
Maybe they found something they shouldn't?
Nooooooooooooo! Nooooooooooooo! Nooooooooooooo! For the love of Hawing, Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!
A letter that opens with:
Also, it's a poorly worded letter - they wrote "the team is now working to return New Horizons to its original flight plan", which of course is going to make people think it's going to drift off course or something. Obviously, physics does not work that way. Even if New Horizons exploded today, it's remains would drift right past where it was targeted to be - there's no more burns to make this late in the game. Better wording would have been original science plan. And the science plan doesn't call for any particularly critical science in the next few days.
These sorts of faults happen in spacecraft (often due to cosmic rays), and they're designed to handle them. New Horizons seems to have handled it perfectly, taking every action that it was supposed to.
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
They don't want us to take pictures of their homeworld.
They can just activate the on-board 3D printer, print out a new probe (with a 3D printer in it), and maybe use private space to help along.
much more reliable
Those do not convey as much information. "Sh*t" not only says as much as "problem" or "anomaly" would about the observed state, but also says something about the state of the observer. "Sh^t" is therefore the more concise-- and eloquent-- word.
Will
New Horizons was launched with mission instructions to proceed beyond Neptune's orbit and look for the next planet.
Nope. No planets here.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Glitch" they say...
Is it possible that in the nine-plus years since it was launched, its communication protocol was hacked (state-sponsored hacking?) and somebody on planet Earth other than it's NASA controllers is telling it behave this way? Is there any value in soft-sabotaging a program that takes nearly a decade to really begin?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Archive footage from 1998
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
I don't think 'anomaly' or 'problem' are the words I'd use as there is at times humorous attempt by agencies/contractors to use such terms to describe totally catastrophic failures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Shaun!
Unfortunately they forgot to enable a channel on Galileo and lost half the data on decent.
Someone just dropped the ball and forgot to get the set of photoshoped images of Pluto in time for the pre confirmed fly by date.
All the people say "Noooo!" please give us our pretty images. All the people at ground control spin media to buy time for the picts to be uploaded on some server as to keep their fake? jobs awhile longer. Government laughs at you all. Oh whats the matter, you only got a brain for the status quo. Or is it look at me, I gots me critical thinking in a box. And people wonder why Hollywood has nothing new to show. IF they did, it would start to make people question and expose he truth around them. So it's rinse and repeat to infinium.
"Snafu"
Table-ized A.I.
Reminds me of my calculus final exam back in the day where my HP calculator started flickering and rebooting 4 minutes before the exam.
I'll tell you the rest after the Pluto encounter...
Table-ized A.I.
Even if New Horizons exploded today, it's remains would drift right past where it was targeted to be .
I get the idea, but you are not absolutely correct. In an explosion parts will fly in all directions, obviously.
Kim Jong-un's face on Charon with his tongue sticking out does look suspicious.
Table-ized A.I.
... and it's nothing whatsoever to do with the strange evenly spaced dark spots on Pluto...
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread1073618/pg1
This is just their staple trick for getting free publicity. They apply it to about every single big mission. "Oh no! Glitch 10 seconds before crucial point!!"
The sad thing is that intellectually bankrupt individuals like yourself get to publicly make such comments and other rednecks believe them. And so funding to do anything really interesting dries up.
And the science plan doesn't call for any particularly critical science in the next few days.
Pluto rotates every 6.4 days. Seems to me that we could be missing a lot in the next few days.
Actually, you are incorrect. The parts flying backwards to the direction of travel will lose a little Delta-V while the parts blowing out sideways will experience a slight change in orbital direction. The entire mass would still fly right by Pluto right on schedule. Track that orbit 500 years into the future and they will disperse, but still will be following a path very close to the original orbit.
So not obviously.
Orbital mechanics is very non-intuitive. And all science fiction movies get it wrong, even Europa report, which did a damn sight better at getting the science right than Gravity or Interstellar did.
Nothing in space follows a strait line, it is all orbits, and all orbits are curved.
For more info: http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_relativity_curved.html
If you want to demonstrate it to yourself grab a copy of KSP,* send a probe to an outer planet, blow it up,** and then watch where the parts go. It is absolutely mind blowing how nothing in space works the way it 'obviously' should.
*KSP https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/en/
**Planned disassembly sending parts in all directions so as not to destroy any, it is a game after all, and exploding pieces just vanish. We call them Kessler bombs, even though Kessler syndrome cannot be simulated due to computational limitations, it's fun to pollute an orbit and damned hard to actually hit anything if you fly through it.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
The people of the outer planets and dwarf planets are getting tired of us always spying on them and they have started incapacitating our spy devices
Back in the Apollo moon landing era although the computational power of the computer on board was less than a smartphone nowadays the NASA engineers completed the feat by coding in machine language / assembly language
Has the quality of American STEM fallen so much that the NASA engineers are using Visual BASIC?
Unfortunately they forgot to enable a channel on Galileo and lost half the data on decent
There is a thing known as "Forgot" and then there is an entirely different thing known as 'conveniently forgetting'
They might be able to fool the joe sixpacks with the 'oh we forgot to enable that channel' but it ain't gonna be an easy sale on us geeks
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The ones who are truly intellectually bankrupted, aka 'The sheeples ', believe in every single thing the authority tells them
Baaaaaaaaah ....
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
UPDATE: NASA issued a statement at about 19:30 PT / 22:30 ET July 5 / 02:30 UT July 6 saying that the cause of the safe mode is understood, and that New Horizons will resume science operations on July 7:
NASA’s New Horizons mission is returning to normal science operations after a July 4 anomaly and remains on track for its July 14 flyby of Pluto.
The investigation into the anomaly that caused New Horizons to enter “safe mode” on July 4 has concluded that no hardware or software fault occurred on the spacecraft. 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. No similar operations are planned 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,” said Jim Green, NASA’s Director of Planetary Science. “Now – with Pluto in our sights – we’re on the verge of returning to normal operations and going for the gold.”
http://www.planetary.org/blogs...
'one to several days' actually means 'we have no idea what's wrong and how to fix it'... it's common CS lingo :)
The whole Intersteller thing with love being the 5th dimension? Yeah... About that? I think we can stop calling it science fiction and just call it fiction. Additionally? It seemed like they used a hat to pull out a standard plot line, three standard tropes/plot twists, and five real bits of science that they did not actually understand. Then they wrote a horrific story to combine them and, of course, had to throw in an entirely absurd premise (love beats physics) because, otherwise, everybody is dead. Then they dragged the movie out with mindless inanities and special effects that pale in comparison to the average effects being rendered today. It is not even bad in a good way, it is just bad. It sucked.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Why not make the craft in such a way so that when it points in dish to earth, its camera can still point to pluto, heres a tip, how about install TWO cameras with 180deg fov, and then you will never miss your target.
Heres a clue, how about a motorized lens that can rotate the camera or lens or whatever.
Heres another clue, design an ultimate design thats fit for any planet/flyby, a generic all purpose best of all situations craft, with plugin addons for specific sensors.
Stop redesigning from scratch each craft for 700 million. NASA you need to learn from the PC industry, modular design. Reduce costs, send more probes, or always send up pairs, like the rovers.
Second, why are they still sending images in JPEG '94, they should use JPEG2000, to reduce the data by another 300% or send 3x more images.
JPEG'94 is junk.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Why cant the sensors have their own memory, and record data, regardless of what the state of the main computer is.
Each sensor should have its own cpu/OS/storage/backup battery. Main computer can just access each sensors data via http, over internal ethernet (backup wifi), and repackage up to send to earth, while the sensors can keep recording at the same time.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.