http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20090828.php

New Horizons Checks Out, Enters Hibernation
August 28, 2009

The New Horizons mission team has closed out a successful summer
workout, putting its Pluto-bound spacecraft back into hibernation Aug.
27 after seven weeks of functional tests and system checks.

The mission's third annual checkout (ACO-3), which started July 7,
"went
very well," says Mission System Engineer Chris Hersman, of the Johns
Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "New Horizons is in
good
shape."

Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research
Institute,
says ACO-3 was less "cluttered and complex" than previous ACOs, kept
simple to let mission engineers and scientists focus on Pluto-
encounter
planning. But it was still productive: the team performed functional
checkouts of all seven science instruments and every spacecraft
subsystem, including the primary and backup hardware in each system;
carefully tracked the spacecraft to refine its knowledge of New
Horizons
trajectory; and uploaded the instructions that will guide New Horizons
through hibernation.

The Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation
(PEPSSI)
and Solar Wind at Pluto (SWAP) instruments also each accumulated about
a
day's worth of data on the interplanetary gases and particles around
the
spacecraft - currently 1.33 billion miles (2.13 billion kilometers)
from
the Sun, nearly halfway between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus, more
than 14 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

The team will pull New Horizons out of hibernation for 10 days
starting
on Nov. 9, for a set of maneuvers that keep Earth in the beam of the
spacecraft's antenna. "It's an adjustment we have to make as Earth
moves
around the Sun and New Horizons moves farther along on its path toward
Pluto," Hersman says.

For frequent mission updates, follow the New Horizons Twitter page at
www.twitter.com/newhorizons2015 .