NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has awakened from its longest sleep ever, nearly 6 billion miles from Earth. The spacecraft, which explored Pluto and distant solar system objects in unprecedented detail, went into a planned hibernation mode on August 7, 2025, and woke up on June 23 using commands stored on its main computer.

New Horizons’ Mission

The mission’s flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed that New Horizons is in great shape and ready to transmit a stream of science data gathered during hibernation from its location in the region of icy objects known as the Kuiper Belt.

Pluto is the largest of thousands of frozen, rocky bodies called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, that exist in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system — remnants from its formation 4.5 billion years ago. In 2015, New Horizons became the first spacecraft to conduct a detailed flyby of Pluto and its moons, which changed scientists’ understanding of the frigid dwarf planet.

Continued Exploration

The spacecraft is capturing data about the rotation rates, orientations, and shapes of frozen objects that orbit in the Kuiper Belt. The measurements provide insights into how planets are born from dust and pebbles, said Pontus Brandt, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

New Horizons has continued exploring the mysterious Kuiper Belt — and it’s uncovering surprising revelations. The spacecraft also measures the distribution of gas in the outer heliosphere, the expansive, protective bubble formed by a steady stream of particles that release from the sun called the solar wind.

Original reporting: KRDO (Colorado Springs metro) — read the source article.