NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Wakes Up Nearly 6 Billion Miles from Earth After Almost a Year in Hibernation

NEED TO KNOW

• The spacecraft emerged from a 321-day hibernation 5.9 billion miles from Earth, with signals taking nine hours to reach NASA

• New Horizons collects data while in hibernation and will now undergo system checks and software updates for future operations

• Launched in 2006, it made history exploring Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, revealing new insights about the solar system

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has successfully awakened after spending nearly a year in hibernation, marking its longest dormant period since launching in 2006.

Mission controllers confirmed on June 23 that the spacecraft safely emerged from a 321-day hibernation period that began on Aug. 7, according to a news release from NASA. New Horizons is currently about 5.9 billion miles from Earth, meaning it took nearly nine hours for its signal to reach mission controllers through NASA’s Deep Space Network.

The spacecraft enters hibernation during long stretches of its journey to conserve resources. While in that mode, it continues collecting scientific data using onboard instruments, even though mission teams do not send commands or receive data.

“Every status report through this hibernation period was ‘green,’ meaning all was well aboard New Horizons each and every week,” mission operations manager Alice Bowman said in the release.

Now that the spacecraft is active again, engineers will begin downloading health and safety information before retrieving data collected by its scientific instruments. In the coming weeks, the mission team will also perform routine system checks and continue studying the outer reaches of the solar system.

NASA is also updating the spacecraft’s ground software and onboard systems to support operations as New Horizons travels even farther from the sun, where power is more limited and communication delays continue to grow.

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Launched in January 2006, New Horizons became the first spacecraft to fly by Pluto in 2015 before continuing deeper into the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune filled with icy objects. In 2019, it made history again by becoming the first spacecraft to explore the distant object Arrokoth.

“The Kuiper Belt could simply be much more extended than what we previously have thought,” Pontus Brandt, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, told CNN. “I have a hunch that we have just scratched the surface of what the entire solar system really looks like. We have to remember that there are likely 100’s of unexplored dwarf planets and 1000’s of smaller objects out there.”

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