The deep space probe known New Horizons has just been woken up from "hibernation" after an unprecdented 3 billion mile, 9 year long journey. It will be studying the dwarf planet, or rather ex-planet Pluto, its moons, and the Kuiper Belt.

New Horizons will spend six months observing Pluto begining in January 2015.

"New Horizons might have spent most of its cruise time across nearly three billion miles of space sleeping, but our team has done anything but, conducting a flawless flight past Jupiter just a year after launch, putting the spacecraft through annual workouts, plotting out each step of the Pluto flyby and even practicing the entire Pluto encounter on the spacecraft. We are ready to go," Mark Holdridge, New Horizons encounter mission manager at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) said.

New Horizons has been placed into hibernation mode and woken up again several times during its flight to the edge of the Solar System. The hibernation period that ends on December 6 will be the last one for the spacecraft. New Horizons is currently more than one billion miles from Earth. At this distance, radio waves take more than 90 minutes to reach the craft.

According to Alice Bowman, manager for the spacecraft's mission operations, the satellite is quietly and healthily cruising in deep space, almost 3 billion miles away from Earth.

Bowman said,  New Horizons' long sleeping mode is over and it's time to wake up and be active from December 6 to commence its Pluto work

The Guardian Liberty Voice reports, " Being the smallest space probe sent out to the solar system, engineers took the pain of selecting miniature components and instrument capabilities to fit on a relatively small payload. It has seven instruments for remote sensing and as situ instruments. The former ones are used to check on things from afar via different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, while the latter measure things from the spacecraft's position, like dust, ions and magnetic fields.

There are a number of remote sensing instruments that are on board. Alice, an ultraviolet spectrometer, is used primarily to study Pluto's atmosphere. It can see wavelengths from 46.5 to 188 nanometers in its spatial 5 milliradians resolutions per pixel. LORRI, is a camera that is sensitive to 350 to 850 nanometers wavelengths with five microradians per pixel high-resolution. It is for optical navigation that is long-ranged, and for detailed imaging as well. It produces better images in monochrome, but they can be colorized with MVIC data of the imager, Ralph.

Ralph is a multi-spectral imager which has five channels in almost-infrared and visible wavelengths between 400 to 975 nanometers and 20 microradians per pixel spatial resolution. Consisting of two sub-instruments LEISA and MVIC, it has color imaging and wide field view capabilities. LEISA is a spectrometer for infrared imaging that spans between 1.25 and 2.5 microns to measure surface temperature and composition. There is also REX, an instrument that can send radio signals to Earth's giant dishes through the atmosphere.

On July 14, 2015, New Horizons will make a close pass by Pluto, just 8,509 miles away. The craft will be taking images and collecting data at greater detail than ever before. Currenly most images of Pluto are very low resolution and contain little information about the edge of our solar system.