[space] The inside story of New Horizons’ ‘Apollo 13′ moment on its way to Pluto … the story of the shutdown and restart of the New Horizons spacecraft ten days before it’s Pluto flyby … ‘They ran through the most likely causes of the anomaly. They had two fairly simple scenarios. The first was that, for some reason, the main computer had rebooted itself. That had happened a few times in the past. The second scenario was that the spacecraft sensed something amiss and, as it is programmed to do, powered down the main computer and switched operations to the backup computer. That had never happened before. If the backup computer had, in fact, taken over communications with Earth, it would use a slightly different radio frequency and transmission rate…’

New Horizons’ Apollo 13 Moment

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 19th, 2015 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Space.

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