The inside story of New Horizons Apollo 13

moment on its way to Pluto

Flight Controllers Sarah Bucier, left, Dan Kelly and Chris Regan monitor data being sent
back by the New Horizons spacecraft as it nears Pluto, at the Johns Hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., on July 8. (J.M. Eddins, Jr./for The Washington
Post)

By Joel Achenbach-July 10

The people in the Mission Operations control center the MOC had been
tracking NASAs New Horizons spacecraft for nine and a half years as it journeyed
the breadth of the solar system. It was just 10 days away from the dwarf planet
Pluto when, at 1:55 p.m. on July 4, it vanished.
Gone.
OUT OF LOCK a computer screen declared.
No more data, no connection at all. As if the spacecraft had plunged into a black
hole. Or hit an asteroid and disintegrated.
Mission Operations manager Alice Bowman called the project manager, Glen
Fountain, who was spending the afternoon of July 4 at home.

We just lost telemetry, she told him.

He raced to the MOC, in the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
(APL) in Laurel, Md. Also arriving within minutes was the missions leader, Alan
Stern, a planetary scientist. Everyone canceled their July 4 plans. They werent
going home tonight. This was a sleep-on-the-office-floor crisis.
I stayed on the floor and it was probably one of the best 15- or 20-minute sleeps

Ive ever had, Bowman says.

The official story from NASA and APL officials over the next two days was this was
an anomaly, and that the team had resolved the issues and gotten the spacecraft
back in shape for the Pluto flyby. But this was no mere glitch. This was almost a
disaster. This was, as Stern would later admit, our Apollo 13.
The disappearance of the spacecraft challenged the New Horizons team to perform
at its highest level and under the greatest of deadline pressures.
The nature of the New Horizons mission did not permit any wiggle room, any delays,
any do-overs, because it was a flyby. The spacecraft had one shot at Pluto, tightly
scheduled: When it vanished, New Horizons was going about 32,000 miles per
hour and on track to make its closest pass to Pluto, about 7,800 miles, at precisely
7:49 a.m. EDT July 14.
But as the New Horizons team gathered in the control room on July 4, no one knew
if their spacecraft was still alive.

Among its projects, the facility is responsible for the New Horizons space probe
and its mission to gather data on Pluto.
[A spacecraft launched in 2006 is about to try for our first good photo of Pluto]

The scene of all this drama is a place with a proud history but a remarkably low
profile. Raise your hand if youve heard of the Applied Physics Laboratory. Raise
the other hand if youve heard of its slogan, Critical Contributions to Critical
Challenges.
Its a sprawling place, hidden in plain sight just west of Route 29 between
Washington and Baltimore. The campus has 20 major buildings on 453 acres. It
has 5,000 full-time and 400 part-time employees, making it the largest employer in
Howard County.
But it cant discuss many specifics. The stealthy nature of the lab reflects its heavy
load of classified research. Major funders include the military (the Navy in
particular), the Department of Homeland Security and the intelligence community.
APL was established during World War II and originally housed in a used car
dealership in Silver Spring. It has racked up a long list of technological
achievements from missile guidance to satellite-based navigation. Researchers here
today are finding ways to protect soldiers from blast injuries. They have created a
prosthetic arm with 26 joints and 17 motors that can curl 45 pounds, tweeze 20
pounds between two fingers and be controlled entirely by brain signals.
When people think of a lab that makes robotic probes that explore the solar system,
they usually think of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. But APL
has a boutique spaceflight operation funded by NASA contracts, accounting for
about 20 percent of the labs overall workload. APL has built and operated 68
spacecraft over the years, including the Messenger spacecraft that recently explored
Mercury. But despite many successes, APL has never had a mission guaranteed to
get as much media coverage as New Horizons.
This is a big deal, says Ralph Semmel, the director of APL.

A rocket carrying the New Horizons spacecraft on a mission to Pluto lifts off in Cape
Canaveral, Fla., in January 2006. (Terry Renna/AP)

Because New Horizons is so far away, it takes 4.5 hours for a one-way message
between the spacecraft and the MOC. That means whatever happened to New
Horizons on July 4 had actually happened 4.5 hours before the people in Mission
Operations knew about it.
That also meant that any instructions to the spacecraft would take 4.5 hours to get
there. This wasnt like talking to a robotic vehicle parked on the moon; a signal
there or back takes not much more than one second.
The team in the MOC knew that one possibility, very remote, was that the
spacecraft had hit something. Its going so fast that it could be disabled by a
collision with something as small as a grain of rice. But theres no rice near Pluto
and, although there are dust particles, rocks, boulders and a few moons, space is
really spacious in three dimensions. The odds of New Horizons hitting anything
during this journey especially while still millions of miles from the Pluto system
are extremely low.
That would be extraordinarily bad luck, project manager Fountain said.

Still, with the spacecraft lost at the edge of the solar system, no one knew what had
happened, or if theyd ever hear from it again.

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.

Object 1

For the first time, were about to get a close look at Pluto and its cold, outer region of
the solar system. The Post's Joel Achenbach explains NASA's New Horizons mission.
(Tom LeGro/The Washington Post)

The APL team decided to check that second scenario straightaway. The team sent a
new set of instructions to NASAs Deep Space Network the trio of huge radio
antennas in California, Spain and Australia that are responsible for communicating
with New Horizons and many other spacecraft. The dish in Australia began
searching for New Horizons at the new frequency.
Everyone waited.
Three oclock came and went.
At 3:11 p.m., one word flashed on screen in the MOC.
LOCKED.
The big dish and New Horizons had established a radio handshake, with data
following almost immediately.

Bowman thought: Thank God, the spacecrafts there, its alive.

The crisis was hardly over. New Horizons had gone into safe mode. That involves
shutting down instruments and noncritical systems. The spacecraft also
automatically turns back toward Earth and goes into a controlled spin of five
revolutions per minute. The spinning makes navigation easier, but it also makes
most scientific observations impossible. A spinning New Horizons could not take
photos of Pluto.
The team figured out what had gone wrong. The spacecrafts main computer had
been compressing new scientific data for downloading much later. At the same
time, it was supposed to execute some previously uploaded commands. It got
overloaded; the spacecraft has an autonomy system that can decide what to do if
somethings not quite right. That system decided to switch from the main to the
backup computer and go into safe mode.
The spacecraft had been in safe mode before but this was terrible timing. They
were just days from Pluto.
We were down to the wire, Bowman said.

No one on the team got angry or lost his or her poise, she said: All of us, I think,
were feeling terrible that this had happened, but we were focused solely on getting
that spacecraft back into an operational state so that we could do this flyby.
On Twitter, anyone following the mission learned July 4 of the anomaly. An
official New Horizons account (@NewHorizons2015) offered an elliptical statement:
New Horizons in safe mode. Were working it folks.
The APL team had to reconfigure New Horizons the way you would rouse a drunk
on a Sunday morning to get him ready for church. This required many commands,
everything made slower by the nine-hour round-trip communication challenge
across the 3 billion miles of space. Bowman slept on her office floor a second night
on Sunday.
One key decision: Return control of the spacecraft to the main computer. They
trusted the main computer, knew its quirks, had tested it repeatedly unlike the
backup computer. They werent going to ask the main computer to do the kind of
sequence that had overloaded it July 4.
On Tuesday morning, July 7, the New Horizons team returned their spacecraft to
no-spin mode and prepared it for the Pluto encounter. This period of
reconfiguration was a bit nerve-racking inside the MOC, because it required
another blackout period of an hour and 15 minutes as the spacecraft lost contact

with the ground.

At 10:21 a.m. Tuesday, the spacecraft popped back up on the screen healthy, on
track, wide awake. At 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, New Horizons began executing the
encounter sequence as programmed.
Huge relief at APL: On to Pluto!
In a news briefing Monday afternoon, with the recovery process ongoing, Stern had
described the anomaly of July 4 as a speed bump. He and his colleagues
downplayed the distressing nature of the event. Thats standard procedure for
engineers and scientists: Admit no alarm. Proclaim competence and preparedness.
But in an e-mail later, Stern compared the incident to NASAs most famous
emergency: No lives were at stake, but in terms of mission success and time
criticality, this was our Apollo 13. And it was our spacecraft and operations teams
finest hour.
As she stood this week in the MOC, a few feet from a mural declaring The Year of
Pluto, Bowman acknowledged the obvious: It was very intense.

Pluto, right, and its moon Charon are pictured from about 3.7 million miles away in this

July 8 photo from New Horizons. (NASA/via Reuters)

Related stories:
A spacecraft launched in 2006 is about to try for our first good photo of Pluto
Graphic: Humanity reaching out with New Horizons
Why did NASA spend 9 years getting to Pluto only to fly right past it?
New photo shows Pluto and its strange moon Charon in living color
New map of Pluto reveals a whale and a donut

Joel Achenbach writes on science and politics for the Post's national desk
and on the "Achenblog."