New Horizons awake and talking

摘要

At 02.53 am UTC on 7 December 2014, NASA's 478 kg (1,054 lb) New Horizons spacecraft reported that it had woken up for the last time prior to reaching distant planet Pluto, which it will encounter on 14 July this year. It is fourteen years since NASA selected the New Horizons spacecraft for a mission to fly past the now most distant planet in the solar system and its several moons - the last of the major bodies known to orbit the Sun and measured so by most people, except those who have reclassified its status which is a matter still under conjecture. The spacecraft is managed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the science investigations are led by the Southwest Research Institute with other spacecraft contributions from Stanford University, Ball Brothers and Goddard Space Flight Center. It was selected over a competing project as the first in NASA's New Frontiers mission series.