NASA lost yesterday one and a half hour contact with the New Horizons spacecraft. This is a short period, but it has major implications for the mission.
Saturday 4 July at 19:54 hours Dutch time the connection with New Horizons was suddenly broken. A little later – at 21:15 pm – engineers managed to restore the connection via NASA’s Deep Space Network. The Deep Space Network is a network of powerful radio transmitters and receivers, which is used to keep in touch with spacecraft that are already outside the solar system, such as Voyager 2.
Pluto and Charon on 3 July. The distance to the duo is 13.5 million kilometers.
Fortunately, the New Horizons spacecraft itself realized that there was a problem. In such a situation changes the probe from the main computer to the backup computer. New Horizons sought again following contact with Mission Control and since then transmits telemetry used by engineers to solve the problem.
New Horizons is nearly five billion kilometers from Earth. Suppose there is a question sent to the spacecraft from Earth, the answer arrive until nine hours later. This delay hinders the progress of the mission. Scientists expect the spacecraft only a few days has fully recovered. Until then, the spacecraft can not collect scientific data.
And that last sentence, which comes hard. Especially since New Horizons Pluto is approaching and so we see every day appear more details in the pictures. Yet it is understandable that scientists want to figure out what’s wrong, because imagine that New Horizons July 13 – one day before the flyby – again affected by this problem? This would bring the entire mission in jeopardy.
New raw photos
Is there any good news? Yes, there are new raw photos appeared. The newest pictures you see on the right. It seems that Pluto has a large crater and the crater rim is still just lit, but this can also be visual trickery. What do you think this is? Respond to this Article
No comments:
Post a Comment