After years of hibernation, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is set to return from hibernation for the final time on December 6. Meanwhile, preparations are being undertaken to get the probe ready for a six-month journey to Pluto that begins in January.

Following its initial launch in 2006, New Horizons has spent 1,873 days in hibernation, or approximately two-thirds of its flight time. During this stretch, the probe has experienced 18 separate hibernation periods from the middle of 2007 to late 2014. The hibernation periods span from 36 to 202 days long.

Alice Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, MD, said in a statement, “New Horizons is healthy and cruising quietly through deep space – nearly three billion miles from home – but its rest is nearly over.” She continued, “It’s time for New Horizons to wake up, get to work, and start making history.”

These hibernation periods have helped reduce wear and tear on the spacecraft’s electronics and have lowered operations costs. The spacecraft’s hibernations have also allowed NASA Deep Space Network tracking and communication resources to be used on other missions.

Mark Holdridge, New Horizons encounter mission manager at APL, explained, “New Horizons might have spent most of its cruise time across nearly three billion miles of space sleeping, but our team has done anything but, conducting a flawless flight past Jupiter just a year after launch, putting the spacecraft through annual workouts, plotting out each step of the Pluto flyby and even practicing the entire Pluto encounter on the spacecraft. We are ready to go.”

According to the New Horizons website, the Kuiper Belt is the major source of cometary impactors on Earth, like the impactor that wiped out the dinosaurs. New Horizons will shed new light on the number of such Kuiper Belt impactors as a function of their size by cataloging the various-sized craters on Pluto, its moons, and on Kuiper Belt Objects.