So far, NASA has dodged the bullet of the Y2K computer glitch and none of its spacecraft fell from the sky or veered off course on New Year's Day.
Flight controllers at NASA's Goddard Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said contacts made with 11 spacecraft -- including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory -- showed all systems were go at midnight EST.
That translated into five hours past the moment (0000 in Greenwich Mean Time or Universal Time) when computers controlling NASA spacecraft marked midnight of January 1, 2000.
"The Agency continues to be 'green,' with no major incidents affecting Agency systems," Goddard controllers said in a prepared statement. NASA issued a similar positive report at 3 a.m. EST, when clocks rolled over to midnight on the West Coast.
Other spacecraft that returned thumbs up signals to NASA include the Landsat 7, Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, Earth Radiation Budget Satellite, X-ray Timing Explorer, Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer, Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer-Earth Probe, Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and Transition Region and Coronal Explorer.
The agency's only Y2K-related hitch showed up a piece of planning software, but that failed to affect any "mission-critical" systems, the agency said.
In recent months, some computer industry analysts have said most technological glitches worldwide related to the 2000 rollover would emerge in the weeks following New Year's Day -- not at the stroke of midnight.
Still, NASA may have heaved a sigh of relief at jumping the initial Y2K hurdle given its recent track record with numbers-related mishaps.
The agency's $165-million Mars Climate Orbiter was lost at the red planet in September 1999 due to a mismatch between English and metric units used in navigation commands. And a $1.3 billion Earth-observing satellite shut itself down last month due to a computational problem prompted by the winter solstice -- a programming scenario NASA failed to plan for. Terra is now back on track.
Early Saturday, flight controllers said NASA's spacecraft had been switched to auto-pilot and would run self-sufficiently during the rollover to January 1, 2000.
Controllers will continue to monitor spacecraft in the next several days.
Other NASA systems that fared well through the 2000 rollover include its Deep Space Network of radio antennae and related tracking stations in Guam, Chile, Alaska, Australia, Madrid and Norway.
NASA's Ames Research Center reported that a key Internet server there made the transition to 2000 with no incident. Other NASA-related systems worldwide reported no problems.
And NASA staffers in Moscow reported that mission control there for the International Space Station suffered no Y2K-related hiccups. The control center was taken offline at 4 p.m. EST (just before the clock struck midnight in Moscow) and successfully brought back online after midnight, according to NASA's Johnson Space Center.
advertisement
