Overview
- Mission controllers at Johns Hopkins APL confirmed that New Horizons autonomously woke from a 321‑day hibernation on June 23 and is reporting healthy status beacons to Earth.
- The spacecraft is about 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) away so each radio message takes roughly 8 hours and 52 minutes to travel one way to mission control.
- Teams are downlinking spacecraft health telemetry now and will begin returning science data from instruments such as the Alice ultraviolet spectrograph, the Solar Wind at Pluto sensor, the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer, and the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter.
- New Horizons is operating on updated onboard autonomy logic while engineers finish ground‑system software upgrades to manage reduced power and much longer communication delays at extreme distance.
- The data collected as the probe moves toward the heliospheric boundary will test models that place the termination shock between about 2029 and 2040 and could reshape understanding of how the Sun’s protective bubble changes over the solar cycle.