{"id":16773,"date":"2014-12-08T20:43:48","date_gmt":"2014-12-08T12:43:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/new-horizons-awake-for-pluto-encounter\/"},"modified":"2014-12-08T20:43:48","modified_gmt":"2014-12-08T12:43:48","slug":"new-horizons-awake-for-pluto-encounter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/new-horizons-awake-for-pluto-encounter\/","title":{"rendered":"New Horizons awake for Pluto encounter"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Artist's
Artist\u2019s concept of the New Horizons spacecraft approaching Pluto and its moon Charon. Credit: JHUAPL\/SwRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Speeding through the outer solar system after a nine-year trek from Earth, NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft is awake and preparing for an encounter next summer with Pluto.<\/p>\n

The probe\u2019s mission control center in Maryland received signals from New Horizons at 9:53 p.m. EST Saturday (0253 GMT Sunday), confirming the spacecraft was active after rousing itself from hibernation more than 2.9 billion miles from Earth.<\/p>\n

Traveling at light speed, the radio signal took 4 hours and 26 minutes to reach Earth, according to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., home of New Horizons mission control.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis 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\u2019s primary objective: the exploration of Pluto and its many moons in 2015,\u201d said Alan Stern, chief scientist on the New Horizons mission from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.<\/p>\n

Saturday\u2019s wakeup starts several weeks of preparations, testing and priming of New Horizons to formally start collecting scientific observations of Pluto and its surroundings on Jan. 15.<\/p>\n

The robotic spacecraft is due to fly 6,200 miles from Pluto on July 14, 2015. It promises to bring the distant world into focus, replacing fuzzy images from the Hubble Space Telescope with high-resolution photos that will help scientists map craters, mountains and ice sheets believed to cover Pluto\u2019s crust.<\/p>\n

New Horizons has spent about two-thirds of its flight time in hibernation since the craft launched in January 2006. But officials periodically woke up the probe to test instruments and practice for the encounter at Pluto, when scientists have only one chance to get it right.<\/p>\n

\u201cTechnically, this was routine, since the wakeup was a procedure that we\u2019d done many times before,\u201d said Glen Fountain, New Horizons project manager at APL. \u201cSymbolically, however, this is a big deal. It means the start of our pre-encounter operations.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hibernations saved time, officials said, allowing scientists to focus on planning the mission\u2019s future scientific endeavors instead of tracking its flight through the void of space.<\/p>\n

In the next few weeks, ground controllers will prep New Horizons and its seven science instruments for the flyby.<\/p>\n

\"New
New Horizons mission operations team member Karl Whittenburg and mission operations manager Alice Bowman watch screens for data confirming that the New Horizons spacecraft had transitioned from hibernation to active mode on Dec. 6. Credit: APL<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll have about six weeks to do final preparations for the encounter,\u201d said Alice Bowman, the New Horizons mission operations manager at APL. \u201cWe\u2019ll be downlinking data \u2014 health and safety data \u2014 that was collected over this hibernation period. We\u2019ll be doing memory checks on the different components on the spacecraft. We\u2019ll be downlinking all the instrument data that we collected during hibernation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Engineers will upload the latest pointing and navigation data to New Horizons and wipe the memory of the probe\u2019s data recorder, which will store information collected by the spacecraft\u2019s sensors over the next year.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we first launched this spacecraft, I was amazed that we were going to have a 10-gigabit recorder space \u2026 Silly me, I thought for that scientists, that\u2019s great. They\u2019re going to have a hard time filling that up. Boy, was I wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

New Horizons will spend the first three months of 2015 taking photos of Pluto to ensure the spacecraft is on track for the flyby. The probe\u2019s instruments will also record the plasma and dust environment as it darts through the outer solar system for comparison with data gathered at Pluto, according to Hal Weaver, the New Horizons project scientist at APL.<\/p>\n

\u201cNew Horizons is on a journey to a new class of planets we\u2019ve never seen, in a place we\u2019ve never been before,\u201d Weaver said. \u201cFor decades we thought Pluto was this odd little body on the planetary outskirts; now we know it\u2019s really a gateway to an entire region of new worlds in the Kuiper Belt, and New Horizons is going to provide the first close-up look at them.\u201d<\/p>\n

By May, a telescopic camera aboard the spacecraft will start taking images of Pluto with better clarity than possible with Hubble, which is stationed in Earth orbit.<\/p>\n

\u201cI expect we\u2019re going to find lots of surprises,\u201d Stern said. \u201cThat\u2019s the most common thing on a first reconnaissance mission \u2014 we find things that we didn\u2019t expect just by going and having a look with powerful instrumentation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Artist\u2019s concept of the New Horizons spacecraft approaching Pluto and its moon Charon. Credit: JHUAPL\/SwRI Speeding through the outer solar system after a nine-year trek from Earth, NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft is awake and preparing for an encounter next summer with Pluto. The probe\u2019s mission control center in Maryland received signals from New Horizons at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2173,2174,2848,4004],"class_list":["post-16773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-kuiper-belt","tag-new-horizons","tag-pluto","tag-pluto-flyby"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16773"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16773\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}