NASA's New Horizons probe just woke up from hibernation 6
billion miles away beyond Pluto. What's it doing out there?
"All these discoveries from pioneering missions like
Voyager and New Horizons teach us how little we know about what lies
beyond."
NASA's New Horizons probe has woken up in good health nearly
6 billion miles away beyond Pluto after spending nearly a year in hibernation.
Traveling such vast distances between our solar system's
most remote objects means New Horizons often cruises for months at a time with
little to do other than passively collect data. During these periods, the probe
goes into a hibernation mode in which its instruments still collect data, but
most other systems power down.
New Horizons entered just such a hibernation period last
August, and has now woken up in "good health", according to a NASA
statement. The spacecraft is 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from
Earth, so far away that it takes around 9 hours for its radio signals to reach
us. Now that it's awake, New Horizons will begin transmitting the data it has
collected over the last 321 days and letting its controllers on the ground know
how its systems are faring in the cold, dark reaches of deep space.
So far, the probe appears to be in perfect health.
"Every status report through this hibernation period was 'green,' meaning
all was well aboard New Horizons each and every week," said Alice Bowman,
the New Horizons mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied
Physics Laboratory (APL) in the NASA statement.
New Horizons is the first and only flyby spacecraft to
conduct a flyby of the Pluto system, which it did in 2015. Four years later,
the plucky probe studied the most distant object ever explored in our solar
system, the snowman-shaped planetesimal Arrokoth, while it was one billion
miles (1.6 billion kilometers) past Pluto.
Since then, the long-distance voyager has been probing the
edge of our sun's influence and studying objects in the Kuiper Belt, the cold,
donut-shaped ring of icy objects that circles the outer solar system beyond
Neptune.
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A processed image made from data gathered by NASA's New
Horizons spacecraft on Jan. 1, 2019 during its flyby of Kuiper Belt object 2014
MU69, known as Arrokoth. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied
Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute) |
New Horizons is currently speeding away from Earth at a rate
of 300 million miles (483 million km) per year, according to NASA.
Three weeks from now, New Horizons will begin conducting a
study of hydrogen in the outer heliosphere, the region of space influenced by
the stream of charged particles blowing outward from the sun, known as the
solar wind.
The data the probe is collecting at the farthest reaches of
our solar system is the first of its kind. It could help scientists understand
what happens at the boundary between the sun's region of influence and
interstellar space, known as the "termination shock."
Only two spacecraft have crossed this boundary before,
NASA's twin Voyager probes. However, those far-flung explorers weren't equipped
with the same scientific instruments as New Horizons, which enable it to
conduct more sensitive measurements of this distant region of the solar system.
"The data from the termination shock encounter will be
a treasure trove for space physicists worldwide who are eager to understand how
this vast boundary works," Pontus Brandt, New Horizons project scientist
at APL, previously told. "All these discoveries from pioneering
missions like Voyager and New Horizons teach us how little we know about what
lies beyond."