Some good news from a long way off. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, the probe that gave us the first close look at Pluto in 2015, has woken from the longest hibernation of its two-decade mission, and it is in good health [1].
Flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory confirmed on June 23 that the spacecraft had come out of a 321-day sleep, a rest that began the previous August [1]. It is now roughly 5.9 billion miles from Earth, near the edge of the solar system, and it is already resuming science: its ultraviolet spectrograph, its solar-wind and particle instruments, and a dust counter that was designed and is operated by students [1].
The detail that says the most is a quiet one. Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager, said that every status report through the long hibernation came back the same way. 'Every status report through this hibernation period was green,' she said, 'meaning all was well aboard New Horizons each and every week' [1].
The spacecraft launched in 2006, which makes it 20 years old, built for a nine-year trip to Pluto and still working billions of miles past it [2]. It is just a small, durable piece of good news: a machine humans built two decades ago, awake and healthy at the frontier of the solar system, with a student-built instrument still along for the ride.
