Has the Pluto mission gone wrong? Over the weekend, an unmanned NASA spacecraft was on its way to a momentous encounter with Pluto. However, the space agency briefly experienced a communication blackout on Saturday.

On Monday, NASA announced that they had detected the glitch, which caused the temporary loss of contact with the unmanned spacecraft on its way to Pluto, during the Fourth of July holiday. According to The Sun Daily, scientists were baffled as they tried to figure out what had gone wrong onboard the New Horizons spacecraft, which was almost 4.8 billion kilometers away from the Earth.

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Luckily, NASA has finally identified the computer glitch over the weekend, which threatened the upcoming historic flyby of Pluto and caused the radio communications shut down with Earth on Saturday. As per The Sydney Morning Herald, the cause of the problem was a timing flaw in the final batch of software uploaded to the spacecraft.

In the event of such problem, the spacecraft was pre-programmed to switch from its main to a backup computer, which engineers described as similar to a computer crashing.

"The autopilot placed the spacecraft in 'safe mode,' and commanded the backup computer to reinitiate communication with Earth," NASA said. "New Horizons then began to transmit telemetry to help engineers diagnose the problem."

Despite the complicated diagnosis and recovery efforts, the New Horizons spacecraft is healthy again and on track to resume collecting data on Tuesday. As said by the mission's principal investigator Alan Stern, two and a half days of science data were lost, which amounted to six percent of the total number of information it collected during its 9-year mission.

"The spacecraft is in excellent health and back in operation. New Horizons is barreling towards the Pluto system," NASA's Planetary Science director Jim Green stated during the news media briefing, Universe Today noted.

The New Horizons spacecraft has spent most of its long journey to Pluto in hibernation. Fortunately, it was revived in January to begin collecting navigation and science data.

The $700 million New Horizons spacecraft mission, which aims to offer the world its first glimpse of the distant dwarf planet Pluto, is being closely monitored by space enthusiasts as the spacecraft makes a historic flyby of the planet on July 14.

Pluto is the most distant and last unexplored planet in the solar system. Therefore, it presents enormous complexities to those daring enough to taunt the mightiest things.

TagsPluto Mission, Pluto Flyby, NASA, outer space, new horizons spacecraft, Unmanned Spacecraft Glitch