Overview
- NASA and Johns Hopkins APL confirmed the spacecraft exited a 321‑day hibernation in good health and that weekly status beacons during cruise were all reported as “green.”
- The probe is about 5.9 billion miles from Earth, so one-way radio signals take roughly nine hours and controllers are using the Deep Space Network to receive telemetry and coordinate operations.
- Teams are first downlinking spacecraft health and safety telemetry, then will retrieve stored instrument data that were collected while systems were mostly powered down.
- New autonomy software and ground‑system upgrades have been deployed to handle reduced power and long signal delays at extreme distance, and checkouts of spacecraft and instruments are underway.
- In roughly three weeks the Alice ultraviolet spectrograph will begin a targeted survey of hydrogen in the outer heliosphere to probe the termination‑shock region, offering measurements that complement earlier Voyager data.