re: The fact that they reacquired the signal exactly on time is a very good sign
Actually Larry I heard them discussing that before hand, and said in this case, because of the trajectory it wouldn’t make any difference if it shut down early or not, the signal would be re-acquired at the same time either way. It's just a quirk of the trajectory, and the position of the Earth when it is re-acquired. They had a graphic that made it clear. They had to wait till they got data from the spacecraft to determine the burn time and orbit. The only other thing would have been if it burned to long plunging it into the atmosphere and burning it up. But obviously that didn’t happen.