Will NASA’s New Horizons reveal Pluto’s secrets?

Will NASA’s New Horizons reveal Pluto’s secrets?

Following a January 2006 launch, New Horizons has accumulated 1,873 days, or around two-thirds of its flight time, in hibernation.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, now active after a long hibernation, is ready for its upcoming encounter with Pluto. The journey is set to take place in 2015.

The switch from hibernation to active mode follows a voyage of approximately nine years and three billion miles. This is the farthest distance covered by any space mission to reach a target.

Operators from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed they received the signal from New Horizons, which is presently over 2.9 billion miles from Earth and nearly 162 miles from Pluto. The radio signal sent from the fast-moving New Horizons required a time of four hours, 26 minutes to reach NASA’s Deep Space Network station in Australia.

Following a January 2006 launch, New Horizons has accumulated 1,873 days, or around two-thirds of its flight time, in hibernation. The spacecraft has had numerous hibernation periods from mid-2007 to late 2014, spanning in length from 36 to 202 days in length. The primary goal of this hibernation period is to minimize wear and tear on the spacecraft and to decrease the potential risk of system failures.

Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons, said in a statement, “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.”

According to the official New Horizons website, although binary planets are thought to be common in the galaxy, as are binary stars, no spacecraft has yet explored one. New Horizons will be the first mission to a binary object of any type.

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