NASA’s New Horizon unawakens from slumber

NASA’s New Horizon unawakens from slumber

After about an hour and a half after its expected turning on time, the spacecraft New Horizon, scheduled to conduct scientific analysis for the first time ever on the Dwarf Planet Pluto, awoke from its hibernation and sent a transmission back to scientists here on Earth.

After about an hour and a half after its expected turning on time, the spacecraft New Horizon, scheduled to conduct scientific analysis for the first time ever on the Dwarf Planet Pluto, awoke from its hibernation and sent a transmission back to scientists here on Earth. This is a spectacular accomplishment for NASA, given the spacecraft is currently 2.9 billion miles from Earth, and will conduct the first ever high-quality photographs of Pluto.

With the signal New Horizon sent to Earth, even traveling at the speed of light, took 4 hours and 26 minutes for it to reach NASA’s Deep Space Network in Canberra, Australia. It was announced at 6:53 PST, by the John Hopkins University of Applied Physics Laboratory, that New Horizons was officially in its ‘active mode’.

“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 in a statement. “Symbolically, however, this is a big deal. It means the start of our pre-encounter operations.”

The New Horizons spacecraft has completed the first stage of its incredible journey. Traveling nine years through deep space to reach the end of our solar system over 3 billion miles away. For the majority of that impressive trip, the craft stayed in a state of half sleep with only a few of its instruments operating. After this final wake up call, New Horizon will begin its historical observations of Pluto by January 15th, becoming the most distant observational mission of any planetary observation.

Some may argue Pluto is intact not a real planet, as we have seen from the LATimes.”The geophysical definition of a planet is that the object has enough mass that its gravity holds it in a perfect sphere,” said Harold Weaver, of Johns Hopkins and the principal project scientist on the mission. “Pluto is almost a perfect sphere, and on this mission we will find out if has enough mass that it deserves to be in the planet category.”

 

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