NASA prods sleeping New Horizons spacecraft: Wakey, wakey, Pluto's calling

NASA has awoken its New Horizons spaceship as it draws closer to dwarf planet Pluto, nearly nine years after the mission to explore the system began.

Boffins at the John Hopkins University applied physics lab (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed late last night that the switcheroo from hibernation to "active" mode had been successful.

"Moving at light speed, the radio signal from New Horizons – currently more than 2.9 billion miles from Earth, and just over 162 million miles from Pluto – needed four hours and 26 minutes to reach NASA’s Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia," the US space agency said.

The awakening of the New Horizons spaceship was a routine procedure, said the mission's project boss Glen Fountain at the APL. But he added that this particular wake-up call was symbolic, since it represented the start of "pre-encounter operations."

Since 19 January 2006, when New Horizons blasted off from Cape Canaveral on its one-way trip to Pluto, the craft has spent 1,873 days (roughly two-thirds of its flight time) in hibernation.

New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado enthused:

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.

New Horizons, which is loaded with advanced imaging infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers, a compact multicolour camera, a high-resolution telescopic camera, two powerful particle spectrometers and a space-dust detector, will begin observing Pluto from the middle of next month.

Its closest approach to the dwarf planet is expected to take place on 14 July.

“For decades we thought Pluto was this odd little body on the planetary outskirts; now we know it’s really a gateway to an entire region of new worlds in the Kuiper Belt, and New Horizons is going to provide the first close-up look at them,” said APL project scientist Hal Weaver. ®