🌅 NASA’s New Horizons Just Woke Up

SOURCE

NASA

WHAT TO KNOW

• NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft recently came out of a nearly yearlong hibernation, waking up in “good health” as it touches the outer edge of our solar system some 5.9 billion miles from Earth. NASA routinely puts the probe into resource-saving hibernation mode during long cruise periods, when the spacecraft has little to do other than passively collect data as it travels between the solar system’s most remote objects. Now that it’s awake, New Horizons will begin transmitting the data collected during its 321-day rest—the probe’s longest-ever hibernation period—back to Earth via radio signals that take nearly nine hours to reach the planet.

WHY IT MATTERS

• New Horizons was the first spacecraft to explore Pluto up close, conducting a detailed flyby of the dwarf planet and its moons in 2015, nine years after launch. Four years later, the probe reached its second major target: a snowman-shaped rock named Arrokoth, the most distant object ever explored in our solar system. The data New Horizons is collecting now is the first of its kind, helping scientists understand what happens at the boundary between the Sun’s region of influence and interstellar space, called the “termination shock.” Its current mission is set to conclude in 2029, however, the mission may be extended if the spacecraft is healthy and still able to collect valuable data. The probe’s current trajectory will eventually take it outside the heliosphere (the boundary where influences outside our solar system are stronger than those of our Sun) and into interstellar space.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• New Horizons follows in the footsteps of NASA’s twin Voyager probes, the only spacecraft to venture outside of the heliosphere. Launched in 1977, the spacecraft are known for the “Golden Records” attached to their bodies, which contain sounds and images portraying life on Earth. In May 2025, NASA engineers successfully revived a set of thrusters on Voyager 1, overcoming a distance of some 15 billion miles to unlock a crucial backup propulsion system ahead of a blackout period that could have doomed the 50-year-old spacecraft.