New Horizons Pluto probe just woke itself up after 321 days of hibernation
Good luck getting your PC to do that after lunch
NASA’s New Horizons probe has woken itself up after 321 days of hibernation.
The aerospace agency sent commands to the probe last July, instructing it to commence hibernation on August 7 and then resume activity in July 2026.
On July 23, NASA checked to see if New Horizons had obeyed the instruction to wake up and was pleased to find it was online again.
New Horizons’ main job was to make our first ever visit to Pluto, which it accomplished in 2015, before zipping off to visit a Kuiper Belt object named Arrokoth in 2019.
At the time of writing, NASA saysthe probe is 64.04 astronomical units (AU) from Earth, or 9.5 billion km/5.9 billion miles. A quick reminder: A single AU is 93 million miles/150 million kilometers, which we mention because New Horizons has travelled 23.0 AU...
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