“NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is awake and
cruising towards Pluto”
By: Deborah Netburn
Source: La
Times
http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-82199398/
NASA's new spacecraft New Horizon is finally
awake. The aircraft that is bound for Pluto is finally awake and is starting
work. New Horizon has woken up from hibernation on Saturday at noon. One and a
half hours later it signaled the Earth that it had successfully turned itself
on. This spacecraft is 2.9 billion miles away from Earth. The signal traveled
through the speed of light so it took four hours and twenty-six minutes for it
to reach NASA's Deep Space Network in Australia. Mission operators at John
Hopkins University studied this signal at the physics laboratory at confirmed
that New Horizon was in active mode 6:53 p.m. New Horizon has spent nine years
traveling three billion miles in space. Two-thirds in that time New Horizon was
in a state of sleep. A few instruments on the New Horizon collected data about
the solar wind and dust particles in space, and it also allowed scientists to
track movements in space. NASA wakes New Horizon at least twice a year to check
the instruments and practice the maneuvers it will make around Pluto. When this
spacecraft woke up it will not go back it sleep, it will start making
observation on Pluto on January fifteen. Scientists still do not know much
about Pluto. They still have not figured out if it should be called a planet.
It is still hard to say what Pluto looks like, but New Horizon with the latest high
definition cameras will capture the shape and color of Pluto. Other instruments
on New Horizon will study the chemical makeup of Pluto's atmosphere and
surfaces. It will also map Pluto's topography and see how it reacts with the
solar wind, and look for rings. Researchers on this project state that this
wake-up call was an important milestone.
This is an important article to read because it
shows the audience how some of these spacecraft’s that are sent to space work,
and what happened to one of them. This article states how Pluto can finally be
discovered in detail because of New Horizons wake-up call. We will soon find
out what Pluto looks like and see if researches do call Pluto a planet.
