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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.
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.
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.
Giorgio, is that you?
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.
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
Since this is slashdot, how about pseudocode?
function handle_fault_on_approach()
{
if (NOTHING_PARTICULARLY_SPECIAL_GOING_ON)
{
tell_nasa about_error();
go_into_safe_mode();
wait_for_instructions_from_nasa();
}
else if (FLYING_BY_PLUTO_RIGHT_NOW)
{
tell_nasa about_error();
wait_to_hear_back_from_nasa = FALSE;
handle_error_in_a_reasonable_manner_on_your_own();
get_back_to_gathering_before_you_miss_the_flyby_goddammit();
}
else if (FLYING_BY_EARTH)
{
dammit_steve();
}
}
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
I don't have any knowledge specific to this project, but I'll give you my interpretation:
The engineers programmed the on-board software to know approximately what the spacecraft should be doing at certain times. New Horizons uses on-board fuel to spin up so that it can more reliably transmit information back to Earth. However, it cannot take pictures while spinning, so it'll have to spin-down. In an "everything's fine" scenario, there will be set times for it to spin up, transmit its data, spin down, capture more data, etc. That's the default timeline.
In previous spacecraft, if something has gone wrong, then the default response was to "stop and wait for further instructions". The idea was that doing "something" could be worse than doing "nothing" and waiting for a human to figure out the best course of action. In other words, it "went fetal".
Pluto is a tad far away, and signals take about 4.5 hours each way. So, a minimum of 9 hours would be required for a response to a problem, not including engineer problem solving and implementation time. That's long enough that the spacecraft may miss the window of ideal picture taking time while waiting for a response, assuming one ever arrives. What it'll likely do in this case is carry on with the mission, and only after it has acquired the flyby data will it call back home and—in Windows parlance—check for updates.
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?...
Unfortunately they forgot to enable a channel on Galileo and lost half the data on decent.
What do you call it when something has a simple, obvious answer, and someone suggests instead a pointlessly complex and ridiculous alternative? Occam's Trash Can?
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
"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.
Kim Jong-un's face on Charon with his tongue sticking out does look suspicious.
Table-ized A.I.
What is it this time??
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
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 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."
I don't recall those as being radiation hardened. There is the idea of using multiple COTS chips with the extras being for fail-over but then you have the added weight which really does matter.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You sir, won the internet yesterday. I am behind the times. However, it took me a minute and then I finally read your name. Too funny.
"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.
What do you call it when something has a simple, obvious answer, and someone suggests instead a pointlessly complex and ridiculous alternative? Occam's Trash Can?
Just because it may be "pointlessly complex and ridiculous" does not mean it is not true. It just means it is somewhat less likely.
Murphys Law rules, "likelyhood" is of no use in troubleshooting. 8-)