After 9 Years And 2.9 Billion Miles, Nasa Spacecraft New Horizons Gets

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NASA Spacecraft ‘Wakes Up’ Near Pluto, 2.9 Billion Miles From Earth

By Luminary Daily / 

 

8 December 2014

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“After a voyage of nearly nine years and three billion miles —the farthest any space mission has ever traveled to reach its primary target – NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft came out of hibernation today for its long-awaited 2015 encounter with the Pluto system,” NASA announced in a statement on Saturday December 6.

 

New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006, has since traveled 2.9 billion miles from Earth and is now within 162 million miles of Pluto.

“This 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’s primary objective: the exploration of Pluto and its many moons in 2015,” said New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute, Alan Stern.

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After spending 1,873 days in hibernation mode, operators at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., confirmed at 9:53 p.m. (EST) on Saturday that New Horizons switched to “active” mode and the radio signal took 4 hours and 26 minutes to reach NASA’s Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia.

The radio signal? A special greeting and version of the Star Trek song “Where My Heart Will Take Me” recorded by English tenor Russell Watson, who had previously provided “wake up” songs to four other space shuttle missions.