NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is awake and almost ready to change our view of Pluto forever

2015 is going to be an exciting year in space exploration. On Dec. 6, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft woke up from hibernation more than 2.9 billion miles away from Earth. That puts it just over 162 million miles from Pluto, the focus of its mission -- the very last planet in our solar system to be visited by a spacecraft. New Horizons left Earth nearly 9 years ago, and the craft has spent almost two-thirds of that time in one of 18 hibernation periods designed to keep its systems operational.

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