Date of event: July 4, 2015
Location of probe: Near Pluto
News Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/something-scary-went-wrong-nasas-181900139.html
NASA does something that I have seen many times over the last few decades. Whenever a probe gets close to something that they say they can measure, a plume of water from a moon, a first close up view of a planet or moon, NASA will cut transmission and go covert mode, to insure there are no signs of alien structures or ships in the area. Often times there are. This has even happened to the rover. Faking a shut down is so easy for them to get away with. Who in the public would question NASA about it? See the links below. If you know others that NASA shut down, leave the link below in comments please. SCW
Mars rover shut down due to short circuit.
Comet lander shuts down after sending data.
NASA’s Juno probe unexpectedly shuts down en route to Jupiter.
NASA shuts down Stardust spacecraft.
Kepler spacecraft mission threatened.
Autonomous probe shuts down.
News states:
On July 4, NASA got an unexpected surprise: Its spacecraft, New Horizons, cut off communications with Earth as it was headed toward Pluto.
New Horizons is scheduled to fly by Pluto on July 14 and use <“>the seven instruments on board to collect information that will significantly advance the way we understand this tiny, icy world that’s floating in space 4.67 billion miles away.
However, that goal is now in jeopardy.
At 1:54 p.m. ET on July 4, something happened that caused New Horizons to cut communications with Earth, NASA reported. Scientists are now trying to figure what that “something” was.
Fortunately, the agency was able to reestablish a connection with the spacecraft within the next 90 minutes. They reported that the spacecraft is still “healthy” and on course to fly by Pluto.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that in order to reestablish connection, the spacecraft kicked itself into safe mode and is now no longer collecting scientific data. So all of the photos and scientific measurements that scientists have been looking forward to for nearly a decade, since New Horizons launched on January 19, 2006, might never be collected.
“This is scary,” wrote Emily Lakdawalla for The Planetary Society. “It’s not what the team wanted to be dealing with right now.”
The main objective now for the New Horizons team is to get the spacecraft back into normal operating mode. Within hours of the reported problem, the team convened a review board that is now “working to return New Horizons to its original [science] flight plan.”
But that’s going to take longer than anyone would like because of how far away New Horizons is from Earth. And with only nine days until the spacecraft is scheduled to fly by Pluto, the clock is ticking.
It takes 4.5 hours for the spacecraft to transmit information about what might have happened to it back to Earth. NASA reported that “full recovery is expected to take from one to several days.”
