NASA's New Horizons probe has woken up in good health nearly 6 billion miles away beyond Pluto after spending nearly a year in hibernation.
Traveling such vast distances between our solar system's most remote objects means New Horizons often cruises for months at a time with little to do other than passively collect data. During these periods, the probe goes into a hibernation mode in which its instruments still collect data, but most other systems power down.
New Horizons entered just such a hibernation period last August, and has now woken up in "good health", according to a NASA statement. The spacecraft is 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, so far away that it takes around 9 hours for its radio signals to rea...
