NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, renowned for its stunning close-up images of Pluto, has successfully awakened approximately 6 billion kilometers from Earth.
The probe is navigating the Kuiper Belt and gearing up for an unprecedented mission on New Year's Day: the first-ever flyby of the Kuiper Belt Object known as Ultima Thule.
According to the New Horizons team, Ultima Thule—officially designated 2014 MU69—"will be the most primitive world ever observed by spacecraft in the most distant planetary encounter in history." The probe's 2015 Pluto flyby delivered groundbreaking data, unveiling the dwarf planet's iconic icy heart and advancing our understanding of the outer solar system.
Since December 21, 2017, New Horizons had been in hibernation to conserve resources during its extended journey. "We're a small team, and when we put the spacecraft into hibernation, it takes less time from us," explained Alice Bowman, mission operations manager. "We could spend that time developing the flyby controls, and that's what we were doing," she added.
Last Tuesday, radio signals confirmed the probe had executed onboard commands to exit hibernation, reaching the team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "Our team is in the midst of planning and conducting simulations of our next flyby of Ultima Thule, and we are excited that New Horizons is back in shape to prepare for flyby operations beginning in late August," said principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute.
The team is now gathering navigation data and transmitting commands via NASA's Deep Space Network to ready the spacecraft for the encounter. Though months away, New Horizons is relatively close at 262 million kilometers from Ultima Thule—less than twice the Earth-Sun distance.
The New Horizons team has shared interactive charts HERE to track the probe's position in real time.
Source: New Horizons
