After a voyage of nearly nine years and three billion miles —the farthest any space mission has ever traveled to reach its primary target – NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft came out of hibernation today for its long-awaited 2015 encounter with the Pluto system,” NASA announced in a statement on Saturday December 6.
New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006, has since traveled 2.9 billion miles from Earth and is now within 162 million miles of Pluto.
“This is a watershed event that signals the end of New Horizons crossing of a vast ocean of space to the very frontier of our solar system, and the beginning of the mission’s primary objective: the exploration of Pluto and its many moons in 2015,” said New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute, Alan Stern.
Full article at Luminary Daily
