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It takes a long time to get to anything at the edge of our solar system, and sometimes even spacecraft need to take a nap on a long journey. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft did just that, and the agency says the spacecraft woke up on schedule after 321 days of sleep, the longest nap ever.
Flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory put the spacecraft to sleep on August 7, 2025, using the world’s longest sleep timer. New Horizons woke up using onboard commands on June 23. NASA reported that the spacecraft survived its long sleep without any problems and is “in good health.”
“Every status report during this hibernation period was green, meaning everything was fine aboard New Horizons every week,” said Alice Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager at APL. statement Tuesday.
Exploring Pluto and Arrokoth was New Horizons’ primary mission, but NASA has extended the mission to continue as long as New Horizons can continue to wake itself from its long, frequent naps.
APL operators will download and analyze the spacecraft’s health and safety data, just to be sure. This is followed by scientific data collected by the three science instruments on board the spacecraft while it slept.
Johns Hopkins APL flight controllers Mark Lahr and Josh Albers and mission operations manager Alice Bowman began monitoring New Horizons telemetry data immediately after the spacecraft woke up.
One of many naps
This is not a new exercise for New Horizons. The spacecraft was originally launched in 2006 and is currently located in the Kuiper Belt, a donut-shaped belt around the outer solar system that includes Pluto and other icy bodies. Although it is often compared to the asteroid belt that separates Mars from Jupiter, the Kuiper Belt is much larger and contains mostly ice rather than rock.
New Horizons has called this belt its home since 2015, when it became the first spacecraft to study Pluto up close. You can bet your bottom dollar In hibernation mode He accepted the event, and was put back to sleep while traveling to the next study target, Arrokoth, in January 2019.
“Since 2007, New Horizons has entered hibernation 23 times, for periods ranging from just days to several months.” NASA He said. “Hibernation is a way to extend the life of the spacecraft and reduce mission operating costs. During hibernation, New Horizons remains in a stable spin mode with a significant portion of the spacecraft inoperable.”
