New Horizon Spacecraft

“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.