Spacecraft resumes sending science data from distant Kuiper Belt
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has resumed operations after spending nearly a year in a resource-saving hibernation while the probe was cruising beyond the dwarf planet Pluto. The mission team confirmed the spacecraft is in good health and ready to transmit scientific observations collected during the cruise phase. The confirmation signal traveled for approximately 8 hours and 52 minutes through NASA’s Deep Space Network from its Madrid station to the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
The probe is located roughly 5.9 billion miles — about 9.5 billion kilometers — from Earth. The mission team routinely places New Horizons into hibernation during long cruise phases, powering down most spacecraft systems while the probe continues gathering and storing scientific observations around the clock. During the latest hibernation — the longest the spacecraft has experienced — three instruments remained active: the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument, the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI), and the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter. They gathered data on the outer heliosphere and the local dust environment without interruption.
New Horizons launched on Jan. 19, 2006, and flew past Jupiter in February 2007. The spacecraft conducted NASA’s first flyby of Pluto in July 2015, sending back images of the dwarf planet and its moons. Since then, the probe has continued deeper into the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune.
The spacecraft will now transmit the backlog of scientific observations collected during the hibernation period.