While most Americans were celebrating Independence Day, New Horizons mission managers at NASA were seeking to regain contact with the spacecraft en route to Pluto.

NASA released a mission update Sunday that stated New Horizons experienced an "anomaly" on July 4, but will be fully operational once again by Tuesday. The space agency also stated the spacecraft is still on track for its flyby of Pluto on July 14.

"The investigation into the anomaly that caused New Horizons to enter 'safe mode' on July 4 has concluded that no hardware or software fault occurred on the spacecraft," NASA said in its statement. "The underlying cause of the incident was a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence that occurred during an operation to prepare for the close flyby. No similar operations are planned for the remainder of the Pluto encounter."

NASA could not reach New Horizons for about 80 minutes on Saturday, Discovery News reported. Currently three billion miles from Earth, messages to and from New Horizons take about nine hours all told.

"I'm pleased that our mission team quickly identified the problem and assured the health of the spacecraft," Jim Green, NASA's Director of Planetary Science, said in the update. "Now - with Pluto in our sights - we're on the verge of returning to normal operations and going for the gold."

New Horizons recently maneuvered itself into the ideal flight path for its flyby, but mission managers may still change its course if they detect something potentially harmful in the way.

"Encounter mode short-circuits the on board intelligent autopilot so that if something goes wrong, instead of calling home for help, which is what most spacecraft do and what New Horizons does during cruise flight, it will just stay on the timeline," Alan Stern, lead scientist for New Horizons, told Discovery News before the anomaly. "It will try to fix the problem, but it will rejoin the timeline because if it 'went fetal,' as we say, if it just called home for help, it could miss the flyby."