New Horizons spacecraft to visit Pluto after 9 years of travel

The first spacecraft to ever visit Pluto is set to wake up on Dec. 6 in preparation for its midsummer meeting with the solar system's most famous dwarf planet.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is set to awake on Dec. 6 from the last of its 18 hibernation periods and prepare for its initial approach towards Pluto, which will take place on Jan. 15. The spacecraft is scheduled to come as close as 6,200 miles from the surface of Pluto on July 14, 2015 -- the closest any man-made object has come to the dwarf planet.

The mission marks the first visit outside Neptune's orbit to the Kuiper Belt, which consists of Pluto and thousands of objects that have not yet been identified, according to Spaceflight Now, a space news website.

New Horizons is currently 2.9 billion miles from earth and was launched in January 2006 atop an Atlas V rocket. Pluto at the time was still considered a planet, with scientists later that year voting to demote its status to that of a dwarf planet.

Right now the spacecraft is still 175 million miles away from Pluto so more data on the planet is not expected until January 2015. If things go according to plan, researchers will be starting to get information on the geology of Pluto by June.

Since Pluto's discovery in 1930, astronomers have been able to make only tentative hypotheses about it and other objects around it.

"That's where we would be stuck if we didn't have a mission," said Keith Noll, chief of the planetary systems laboratory at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center. His lab is not directly involved in the mission, but studies Pluto and other objects at the edge of the solar system.