NASA’s Pluto-gazing New Horizons is awake and ready for a new mission

Rise and shine, New Horizons. You’ve got a job to do.

NASA’s intrepid spacecraft, which made its close flyby of Pluto in July 2015, just woke up from a planned nearly six-month hibernation in preparation for its next encounter: On New Year’s Day 2019, it will near a mysterious object that’s never been seen from close range.

The distant object, 4 billion miles from Earth, is known by the nickname Ultima Thule. It’s a billion miles from Pluto in a part of space known as the Kuiper Belt, which is made up of a mass of icy bodies thought to be leftovers from the dawn of the solar system.

When New Horizons flies by Ultima Thule, it will be humanity’s first up-close look at this kind of world. 

But there’s a lot of prep work to be done ahead of that flyby. 

Mission managers on Earth are planning to collect tracking and navigation data over the course of the next three days, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab said in a statement.

“Our team is already deep into planning and simulations of our upcoming flyby of Ultima Thule and excited that New Horizons is now back in an active state to ready the bird for flyby operations, which will begin in late August,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said in the statement.

In August, New Horizons should start taking photos of the far-off object as it flies ever closer. 

The official name for Ultima Thule is 2014 MU69, but that could change after the flyby. NASA is planning to pick a new, formal name, which the agency will submit to the International Astronomical Union, the organization responsible for naming objects and features in the solar system and beyond.

Thanks to earlier observations, we already know a little bit about Ultima Thule. It’s possible that the object actually has a smaller moon orbiting it in distant space. 

“We really won’t know what MU69 looks like until we fly past it, or even gain a full understanding of it until after the encounter,” New Horizons science team member Marc Buie said in a 2017 statement. “But even from afar, the more we examine it, the more interesting and amazing this little world becomes.”

New Horizons already transformed our understanding of Pluto with its historic flyby of the dwarf planet three years ago. 

The spacecraft revealed the never-before-seen surface of the world, which is littered with huge mountains made of ice and even a heart-shaped feature made partially of nitrogen ice.