NASA announced that the space probe "New Horizons" is expected to resume service on Tuesday after the probe's computer crashed over the weekend, threatening to delay its planned Pluto flyby.
On Saturday, "New Horizons" experienced a shutdown of its radio communications with Earth for 81 minutes as it drew nearer toward the end of a nine-and-a-half-year journey to the unexplored regions of outer space.
Project manager Glen Fountain said that the glitch was attributed to an overload to the craft's primary computer, as ground controllers tried compressing data to free up memory while installing the operating sequence for its probe on Pluto on its flash drive, as reported by NDTV Gadgets.
The probe's main computer crashed, triggering a switch to its backup as it awaited instructions from ground control. As a result, "New Horizons" shut down its communications and temporarily suspended its task.
Engineers at NASA traced the problem and worked double time to keep New Horizons ready for its next encounter with Pluto on July 14.
Stuff said that the probe does not have the great amount of propellant required to reduce its speed and drop into orbit around Pluto, a small world circling in the Kuiper Belt region.
Diagnosis and troubleshooting proved difficult from the nine-hour round-trip lag time to reach communication with "New Horizons," as it was 4.8 billion kilometers away from Earth.
The glitch proved costly, as scientists missed 30 observations of Pluto and its primary moon Charon, but this will not affect the overall goals of "New Horizons" according to lead researcher Alan Stern, from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The final batch of software for the encounter will be activated on Tuesday.
By that time, NBC said that the spacecraft is scheduled to begin a pre-programmed observational campaign for the mission that will last for two days after the flyby.
While "New Horizons" is in encounter mode, it will not go into safe mode in the event that it encounters a glitch. It will reboot and return to its pre-programmed timeline. If the computer fails to make a high-priority observational task due to a technical problem, it will try again. Stern said they made sure they have a backup.
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