A new research has revealed that NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has woke up from its electronic sleep for its long-awaited 2015 encounter with the Pluto system.
New Horizons flight controllers Sarah Bucior, Katie Bechtold and George Lawrence monitor data confirming that the Pluto-bound spacecraft had exited hibernation after a voyage of nearly nine years and three billion miles.
Operators at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., confirmed that New Horizons, operating on pre-programmed computer commands, had switched from hibernation to "active" mode.
Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, said that 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, and the beginning of the mission's primary objective: the exploration of Pluto and its many moons in 2015.
Since launching on January 19, 2006, New Horizons has spent 1,873 days in hibernation and its 18 separate hibernation periods, from mid-2007 to late 2014, ranged from 36 days to 202 days in length. The team used hibernation to save wear and tear on spacecraft components and reduce the risk of system failures.
Glen Fountain, New Horizons project manager, said that technically, this was routine, since the wake-up was a procedure that they'd done many times before and symbolically, however, this is a big deal, which means the start of their pre-encounter operations.
New Horizons will begin observing the Pluto system on Jan. 15 and its closest approach to Pluto will occur on July 14, but plenty of highlights are expected before then, including, by mid-May, views of the Pluto system better than what the mighty Hubble Space Telescope can provide of the dwarf planet and its moons.