Overview
- The spacecraft, which awakened on June 23, 2026, completed a planned 321‑day hibernation and has begun sending status telemetry to the Johns Hopkins APL mission operations team.
- New Horizons is about 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth and its radio signals take roughly 8 hours and 52 minutes one way, so the probe must operate on preloaded commands and onboard autonomy.
- Mission operators report weekly status beacons remained “green” during hibernation and are now downlinking stored health and science data while performing staged instrument checkouts.
- In roughly three weeks the Alice ultraviolet spectrograph is scheduled to start mapping hydrogen in the outer heliosphere, and other instruments will resume measurements of solar wind, energetic particles, and dust.
- Models from the Southwest Research Institute place New Horizons’ crossing of the termination shock anywhere from about 2029 to 2040, and the probe’s modern sensors will produce data that complement the Voyagers’ earlier, less capable measurements.