New Horizons: 'Brain Transplant' Successful as Checkout Continues
- From: baalke@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:09:57 -0700 (PDT)
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/091208.php
'Brain Transplant' Successful as Checkout Continues
New Horizons
September 12, 2008
The first major order of business in New Horizons' second annual
checkout was accomplished as planned, as operators uploaded an
upgraded
version of the software that runs the spacecraft's Command and Data
Handling system.
"Our 'brain transplant' was a success," says New Horizons Principal
Investigator Alan Stern. "The new software - which guides how New
Horizons carries out commands and collects and stores data - is now on
the spacecraft's main computer and operating, over a billion miles
from
home!"
The mission ops team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
(APL) in Laurel, Maryland, radioed the software load and the commands
to
start it earlier this week through NASA's Deep Space Network of
antennas
to the spacecraft, now just more than 1.01 billion miles (1.62 billion
kilometers) from Earth. In the next 10 days the team will beam up
additional new software for both the spacecraft's Autonomy and
Guidance
and Control systems.
Alice Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager at APL, says the
spacecraft and its computers are healthy. "The new software fixes a
few
bugs and enhances the way these systems operate, based on what we've
learned in running the spacecraft in the nearly three years since
launch," she says. "They also configure the onboard systems to be
ready
to support the Pluto-Charon encounter rehearsals scheduled for next
summer."
New Horizons is more than 200 million miles beyond Saturn's orbit and
more than 11 astronomical units (1.02 billion miles) from the Sun,
flying about a million miles per day toward Pluto. Annual Checkout 2
(ACO-2) continues through mid-December; follow its progress through
frequent updates on the New Horizons Twitter page
<http://twitter.com/newhorizons2015>.
(New to Twitter? Visit www.twitter.com <http://www.twitter.com/> to
learn more about this new way to ride along with New Horizons.)
.
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