NASA's New Horizons spacecraft successfully woke from its longest hibernation period on June 23, 2026, confirming its good health and readiness to transmit scientific data. The spacecraft, located approximately 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, had been in hibernation for 321 days since August 7, 2025. Flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, received the confirmation via NASA's Deep Space Network station in Madrid, Spain.
New Horizons Resumes Operations
The New Horizons mission team typically places the spacecraft in hibernation during long cruise periods to conserve resources. While hibernating, it continues to gather and store data using its heliospheric plasma sensors, the Solar Wind at Pluto, the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation, and the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter. According to Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager at APL, all status reports during hibernation indicated that "all was well aboard New Horizons each and every week."
As New Horizons resumes active operations, the team will begin downlinking both spacecraft health data and scientific measurements. The first data transmission will include readings from the onboard Alice ultraviolet spectrograph, which is set to study hydrogen gas distribution in the outer heliosphere within three weeks. Other scientific instruments will continue their measurements alongside ground team checkouts.
