New year glitch for the shuttle
The shuttle Discovery was moved to the launching pad on Thursday to await a liftoff that could be as early as December 7, an effort to avoid potential New Year’s Eve computer glitches. The worry is that shuttle computers are not designed to make the change from the 365th day of the old year to the first day of the new one while in flight. NASA hasn’t had a shuttle in space on December 31 or January 1. “We’ve just never had the computers up and going when we’ve transitioned from one year to another,” said Joan E. Higginbotham, a Discovery astronaut. “We’re not really sure how they’re going to operate.”
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