NASA hopes to restore the New Horizons for tomorrow – RIA Novosti

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© Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute

MOSCOW, July 6 – RIA Novosti. NASA and members of the scientific team of the probe New Horizons plan to return to normal tomorrow, when engineers will finish the process of transferring the spacecraft from the “safe mode” to normal operation, according to the press office space agency.

“I am very pleased that our team has quickly found what was causing the problem and found a way to keep intact all the instruments and components of the probe. And now that Pluto is already beginning to be seen in the horizon, we are gradually returning to normal operation the mission, “- said Jim Green (Jim Green), head of the department Planetologicheskogo NASA.

As reported by NASA on Sunday on Saturday on board the New Horizons took a strange glitch that moved the machine in “safe mode” of work and forced engineers to begin the complex process of its awakening and finding the source of the problem.

© Photo: JHUAPL

According to Greene, the analysis of telemetry from the probe showed that the problem was not caused by hardware or software failures of the New Horizons, which is a very good news. The problem, as noted by NASA, has arisen due to improper “schedule” command execution, which had been referred to the probe before its rendezvous with Pluto. Representatives of the space agency assured that this will not happen again.

According to Alan Stern (Alan Stern), head of the mission New Horizons, an unexpected hitch will not change in the scientific program, scheduled at the time of convergence of the probe to Pluto, despite the loss of time. According to Stern, the current quality of the scientific program is still at the level of “A +”.

Now, NASA engineers and scientists completed the awakening of New Horizons, and plan to start a normal scientific work tomorrow, July 7.

New Horizons probe was launched on 19 January 2006. Its main purpose – Pluto and its moon, Charon, Nix and Hydra. It is expected that the unit will come to a minimum distance of Pluto in July 2015. After that, he can continue to study objects in the Kuiper Belt – the outer asteroid belt, where there are many large icy bodies, many of which are believed by astronomers larger than Pluto.