Alan Stern, the mission's P.I., dispelled rumors that contact had been lost on the USF forum, saying "Such rumors are untrue. The bird is communicating nominally."[0]
Also the Deep Space Network[1] page shows an ongoing 1kbps downlink from New Horizons; during the safe mode event it was at only 9bps. So that's a good sign! I'm sure they are still panicking a bit about what went wrong, but hopefully we're out of the woods on this particular anomaly.
The idea that we have an ongoing digital comms with something this far from Earth is completely fascinating to me. Are the encodings used documented anywhere? All I can find out is that it's X-band, 1kb/s.
If you are curious about reading more, CCSDS is an overloaded term in the space industry for an onion of different OSI layers that are changing all the time. My guess is that the telemetry coding standard CCSDS 101.0-B-6 is likely to have been used on New Horizons. Even though it is now a "historical document", some new space missions still use it.
We're saying the same thing. He dispelled rumors that contact had been lost [permanently]. Sorry if that was unclear - the article clearly states it was certainly lost the first time.
Also the Deep Space Network[1] page shows an ongoing 1kbps downlink from New Horizons; during the safe mode event it was at only 9bps. So that's a good sign! I'm sure they are still panicking a bit about what went wrong, but hopefully we're out of the woods on this particular anomaly.
[0] http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=8047&... [1] http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html