NASA's New Horizons probe, which has already provided us with superb shots of Pluto, has just awakened, about 6 billion kilometers from Earth.
The probe is currently moving through the Kuiper Belt and preparing for a thrilling mission, slated for New Year's Day:the first-ever flyby of the Kuiper Belt Object dubbed Ultima Thule> .
According to the New Horizons team, the Ultima Thule object, officially known as MU69 2014, "will be the most primitive world ever observed by spacecraft - in the most distant planetary encounter in history. ". The space probe had already performed a memorable flyby of Pluto in 2015, revealing very important data for researchers, and showing the icy heart of the planet.
But, since December 21, 2017, New Horizons has been taking a long nap, going into hibernation mode to save resources on its very long journey through the outer solar system."We're a small team, and when we put the spacecraft into hibernation, it takes less time from us (to make it work) said Alice Bowman, mission operations manager at New Horizons. "We could spend it (that time) developing the hover controls, and that's what we were doing added Bowman.
But last Tuesday, radio signals confirming that New Horizons had executed onboard computer commands in order to wake up from its hibernation, reached the team at 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 mission principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute.
The team is collecting navigation tracking data and sending commands to the probe via the Deep Space Network, in an effort to begin preparations for the Ultima flyby.
As for the probe, even if it still has a few months to go before reaching the object in question, it is in fact not so far away (from an astronomical point of view). Indeed, New Horizons is currently about 262 million kilometers from Ultima (less than twice the distance between Earth and the Sun).
Additionally, the New Horizons team has produced a number of charts, available online (HERE), if you wish to verify the location of the probe for yourselves.
