Artist’s concept of the New Horizons spacecraft as it approaches Pluto in July 2015. The craft's miniature cameras, radio science experiment, ultraviolet and infrared spectrometers and space plasma experiments will characterize the global geology and geomorphology of Pluto and and its largest moon, Charon, map their surface compositions and temperatures and examine Pluto's atmosphere in detail.(JHUAPL/SwRI)

After traveling for nearly a decade and for more than 3 billion miles, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft awoke from its final hibernation — an alarm set to the music of tenor Russell Watson’s “Where My Heart Will Take Me” — on Saturday, Dec. 6. The next stop is a close encounter with once-planet Pluto slated for mid-July 2015; in 217 days, we’ll be the nearest to Pluto we’ve ever been.

“This is a watershed event,” Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute, said in a news release. It “signals the end of New Horizons crossing of a vast ocean of space to the very frontier of our solar system, and the beginning of the mission’s primary objective: the exploration of Pluto and its many moons.”

New Horizons has slept and woken up 18 different times since its 2006 launch, so the wake-up itself was routine, according to NASA. However, given the spacecraft’s next steps, the agency expressed excitement about this mission, one that’s traveled a greater distance to reach its destination than any previously have.

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In 2012, NASA, working from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, practiced the Pluto meet-up. At the end of May of that year, the team powered up New Horizons’ machinery, with “cameras snapping images, sensors scanning the space environment and the communications system trading radio signals with ground stations on Earth.” New Horizons did what it was supposed to do, Alice Bowman, operations manager at APL, said after the trial run.

Now’s the real test. For the next several weeks the New Horizons team will continue to test the spacecraft’s instruments and build the code sequences for the Pluto encounter. Between now and next July, when New Horizons will get within 6,200 miles of the dwarf planet, the spacecraft won’t simply be hanging out. Rather, according to NASA, it will begin observing the Pluto system in mid-January; by the middle of May, it will start sending back the best images of Pluto we’ll have to date.

“This is the place that this spacecraft was built to operate, and these are the operations that this team has waited a decade to actually go and execute,” Stern told Space.com. “It’s game time.”

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April 24 marks the 25th anniversary of the Hubble Telescope. To celebrate, NASA and the European Space Agency, which jointly run the telecope, released this image of the star cluster Westerlund 2. (NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team/A. Nota/Westerlund 2 Science Team)