New Horizons Is Back Online, Some 6 Billion Miles Off, And Now Into The Deep Kuiper Belt...

You may recall that we've covered this mission since 2015. It is truly an ongoing wonder -- but its signature feat, was the sharpest ever color images -- of tiny Pluto -- revealing a heart-shaped formation, back then -- covering almost a third of the face of that icy orbiter.

Here's the latest on all that, from the Johns-Hopkins APL | NASA teams:

. . .On June 23, flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed New Horizons, acting on stored commands uplinked to its main computer last July, had safely awakened from a 321‑day hibernation period that began Aug. 7. With the spacecraft now approximately 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, the radio signals carrying that confirmation took about 8 hours and 52 minutes to reach the APL Mission Operations Center via NASA's Deep Space Network station near Madrid, Spain. . . .

The mission team typically places New Horizons in resource‑saving hibernation mode during long cruise periods. While the spacecraft is hibernating, operators do not send commands or retrieve data, but the spacecraft continues gathering and storing data around the clock from its heliospheric plasma sensors, Solar Wind at Pluto and the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation, as well as its space dust detector, the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter. . . .

As New Horizons resumes active operations, Bowman noted, the team will begin downlinking spacecraft health and safety data, followed by data from the three scientific instruments.

In about three weeks, the spacecraft’s onboard Alice ultraviolet spectrograph will look at the hydrogen gas distribution in the outer heliosphere, while the Solar Wind at Pluto, the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation, and the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter instruments continue their measurements, and the ground team conducts a series of spacecraft and instrument checkouts. . . .

Smiling into a warm sunny mid-summer's Friday,now. . . .

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