NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is about to wake up from hibernation, and when it does, it’ll achieve space history.

The mission will approach the surface of Pluto and New Horizons will come within 6,200 miles of the dwarf planet—the closest any spacecraft has come to its surface—according to ABC News.

The last of the ship’s 18 hibernation periods ends Dec. 6, and the initial approach toward Pluto will begin on Jan. 15, 2015. The hibernation periods lasted anywhere from 36 to 202 days each, occurring from mid-2007 to late 2014, according to NASA.

NASA estimates that New Horizons will make its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015.

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A Wired report reminds us that when the mission began in January 2006, Pluto was still classified as a planet. It was downgraded to a dwarf planet later that year. When New Horizons launched, Pluto had three known moons; now, a total of five are known to exist, Wired adds, and the mission might find more when it gets closer.

Nine years and 2.9 billion miles later, scientists are hopeful that this mission will turn up all kinds of new findings about Pluto. The spacecraft will use seven instruments to study Pluto, its atmosphere and its interaction with the sun, which appears 900 times dimmer than on Earth, Space Flight Now said. It’s just the beginning of a $700 million mission that includes studying other icy bodies in the Kuiper belt—a ring of thousands of smaller objects that orbit beyond Neptune.

“Every time in the past we’ve had a first look at a new system,”Will Grundy, a planetary scientist working on the mission, told Wired,“we’ve been surprised.”

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A Face on Mars

NASA's Viking 1 Orbiter captured this image on July 25, 1976. NASA says the speckled appearance is due to missing data that happened while transmitting the image from Mars to Earth. (Image: NASA)