Long After Pluto Fly-By, NASA's New Horizon's Probe Wakes Up Again, Starts Doing New Science (cnn.com) 12
Launched in 2006, NASA's New Horizons probe flew by the planet Pluto in 2015. But this week it "awakened from its longest sleep ever," reports CNN.
It's now 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth...
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft went into a planned hibernation mode on August 7, 2025, and woke up on June 23 using commands stored on its main computer. The mission's flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed that New Horizons is in great shape and ready to transmit a stream of science data gathered during hibernation from its location in the region of icy objects known as the Kuiper Belt.
Pluto is the largest of thousands of frozen, rocky bodies called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, that exist in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system — remnants from its formation 4.5 billion years ago... The spacecraft is capturing data about the rotation rates, orientations and shapes... The measurements provide insights into how planets are born from dust and pebbles, said Pontus Brandt, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "There seems to be more paired, snowman-shaped bodies, like Arrokoth, out there than anyone expected," Brandt wrote in an email. "Are such binaries the most common planetesimal and is this how larger planets have been built in our own and other stellar systems? These are very deep questions that New Horizons can help answer."
The spacecraft also measures the distribution of gas in the outer heliosphere, the expansive, protective bubble formed by a steady stream of particles that release from the sun called the solar wind. Meanwhile, an instrument called the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation is measuring galactic cosmic rays, extremely fast particles created when stars explode. The particles pose one of the more severe threats for human activities in space, Brandt said, but the boundary of the heliosphere acts as a shield to protect our solar system from 70% of them. New Horizons' data could help scientists learn more about how this puzzling shielding works, he said.
Another instrument, the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, has collected data that has thrown New Horizon's team a curveball, Brandt said. The team expected dust abundance to be high within the Kuiper Belt due to the significant presence of small objects. But New Horizons has traveled beyond the known boundary of the Kuiper Belt — and it's still in a dusty environment.
Pluto is the largest of thousands of frozen, rocky bodies called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, that exist in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system — remnants from its formation 4.5 billion years ago... The spacecraft is capturing data about the rotation rates, orientations and shapes... The measurements provide insights into how planets are born from dust and pebbles, said Pontus Brandt, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "There seems to be more paired, snowman-shaped bodies, like Arrokoth, out there than anyone expected," Brandt wrote in an email. "Are such binaries the most common planetesimal and is this how larger planets have been built in our own and other stellar systems? These are very deep questions that New Horizons can help answer."
The spacecraft also measures the distribution of gas in the outer heliosphere, the expansive, protective bubble formed by a steady stream of particles that release from the sun called the solar wind. Meanwhile, an instrument called the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation is measuring galactic cosmic rays, extremely fast particles created when stars explode. The particles pose one of the more severe threats for human activities in space, Brandt said, but the boundary of the heliosphere acts as a shield to protect our solar system from 70% of them. New Horizons' data could help scientists learn more about how this puzzling shielding works, he said.
Another instrument, the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, has collected data that has thrown New Horizon's team a curveball, Brandt said. The team expected dust abundance to be high within the Kuiper Belt due to the significant presence of small objects. But New Horizons has traveled beyond the known boundary of the Kuiper Belt — and it's still in a dusty environment.
It has a real operating system (Score:3, Informative)
Wakes Up Again, Starts Doing New Science
Is anyone surprised? It has a real operating system. :-)
Nucleus RTOS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you for this comment. I learned a lot.
https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
A little off-topic (Score:5, Interesting)
In November, the Voyager 1 probe will be one light-day away from Earth.
Let us hope New Horizon's can last as long and provide its own wealth of information.
Re: (Score:2)
To put it into perspective: a day has 86400 seconds.
The moon is a bit more than 1 light second away (roughly 25% more).
So that is about 64 thousand times the distance of earth to moon.
(yes you can use a calculator to get it correct :D )
Re: (Score:2)
Also known as over 16 billion miles. Which is approximately 383 billion Rhode Islands: I did the math. Rhode Island is 48 miles by 37 miles, so I averaged at the mystical 42: 16,094,455,343 / 42 is a little over 383 billion.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for typing that out. Note that your answer can't be right, though.
Re: (Score:1)
Let's hope Voyager lasts until November. The duct-tape is falling off the chicken-wire.
Me too! (Score:2)
Sometimes I wake up and start doing new science. But usually I just roll over and go back to sleep.
Grep is your fiend (Score:2)
Rumor is DOGE scans spotted "trans" in the document and thus cancelled the program for being "woke".
Arrokoth is such a neat body. (Score:3)
For those who didn't follow it, it's not that it's a contact binary [wikimedia.org] that is so neat in and of itself, it's that when they modeled it, they determined that, the collision that formed it was less than 5 meters per second (less than 11 mph / 18 kph). Like a parking lot fender bender, but with the cars being ~750 billion tonnes.
Do the contact binaries all have white bands? (Score:1)
"There seems to be more paired, snowman-shaped bodies, like Arrokoth, out there than anyone expected," Brandt wrote in an email. "Are such binaries the most common planetesimal and is this how larger planets have been built in our own and other stellar systems?"
Do they all have white bands, like Arroketh? Is magnetism involved?
...the planet Pluto (Score:2)