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New Horizons Pluto Probe Answers Its Wake-up Call Three Billion Miles Away Comment Now Follow Comments

The New Horizons spacecraft has woken out of its deep sleep after nearly nine years and three billion miles of travel to reach its primary target – Pluto.

The NASA probe has gone the farthest that any space mission has ever gone to reach its primary target and has been switched into active mode to prep for the exploration of Pluto and its many moons next year.

“This is a watershed event that signals the end of New Horizons crossing of a vast ocean of space to the very frontier of our solar system,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute.

Operators at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) confirmed over the weekend that New Horizons, following pre-programmed computer commands, was now wide awake. The team waited for more than four hours and 26 minutes for the signal to reach back to NASA’s Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia, since the craft is currently more than 2.9 billion miles from Earth and just over 162 million miles from Pluto.

Artist's concept of the New Horizons spacecraft during a planned encounter with Pluto and its moon, Charon Artist’s concept of the New Horizons spacecraft during a planned encounter with Pluto and its moon, Charon. (Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI))

The craft launched in January 2006 and spent nearly two-thirds of its flight time in hibernation periods ranging from 36 days to 202 days long. This downtime helped the mission team to avoid wear and tear on the probe’s components and cut down on the risk of the systems failing.

“Technically, this was routine, since the wake-up was a procedure that we’d done many times before,” said Glen Fountain, New Horizons project manager at APL. “Symbolically, however, this is a big deal. It means the start of our pre-encounter operations.”

The wake-up sequence was uploaded onto New Horizons’ computer in August and took about an hour and a half to bring the craft out of hibernation.

Now that it’s active, the team will spend the next few weeks checking the spacecraft’s systems and science instruments to make sure everything is running smoothly. They’ll also be testing the computer-command sequences that will guide New Horizons through its flight to and reconnaissance with Pluto.

The probe is kitted out with a seven-instrument payload that includes advanced imaging infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers, a compact multicolour camera, a high-resolution telescopic camera, two powerful particle spectrometers and a space-dust detector. All of which will start pointing at the Pluto system from January 15 next year.

New Horizons will make its closest pass to the dwarf planet on July

14, but before then it will already have captured views of the system that far outstrip the images we’ve gathered with the Hubble Space Telescope.

“ New Horizons is on a journey to a new class of planets we’ve never seen, in a place we’ve never been before ,” says project scientist Hal Weaver, of APL. “For decades we thought Pluto was this odd little body on the planetary outskirts; now we know it’s really a gateway to an entire region of new worlds in the Kuiper Belt, and New Horizons is going to provide the first close-up look at them.”

For more on dwarf planet exploration and other science and tech news, follow me on Twitter and Google +.

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