NASA Awakens New Horizons Spacecraft to Explore Pluto
Awakened from its deep slumber, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which now is just 162 miles away from Pluto, is all set to explore the erstwhile planet.
New Horizons was launched in 2006, when Pluto was still considered a planet. It travelled 2.9 billion miles away from Earth before being woken up on December 6 in what was described as a routine but significant procedure. Signals were transmitted by the spacecraft at the speed of light but took nearly 5 hours to reach NASA on earth, reported CNN.
"Technically, this was routine, since the wake-up was a procedure that we'd done many times before. Symbolically, however, this is a big deal. It means the start of our pre-encounter operations," said Glen Fountain, New Horizons project manager, in a news release.
The spacecraft is carrying seven payloads, all instruments including advanced imaging infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers, a compact multicolor camera, a high-resolution telescopic camera, two powerful particle spectrometers and a space dust detector. The spacecraft will begin observing Pluto January 15, 2015 after scientists ascertain all the devices on-board are functioning efficiently.
"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 Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo.
According to TIME, New Horizons will come closer to Pluto than ever before on July 14, 2015 but would be able to send high resolution images, better than existing Hubble captured images, by May itself.
