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Thanks!

• sohkamyung 9y ago
  Your welcome. But it appears that power saving isn't the reason. As another poster noted, the RTG powering New Horizons doesn't care if it the power provided by the RTG is used or not. I did find this article [1] from when New Horizons was going to Pluto and if the reason is the same, then the hibernation is to prolong the life of the instruments: New Horizons spends much of deep cruise in hibernation - essentially long stretches of electronic slumber in which many of the spacecraft's subsystems (such as science instruments, navigational star trackers and most flight electronics) are turned off to extend their life, and the craft is spin-stabilized to minimize thruster usage. [1] New Horizons Spacecraft to Collect More Data When "Hibernating" [ http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=41333 http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=41333 ]
  • maaark 9y ago
    >the craft is spin-stabilized to minimize thruster usage So one good reason for it to hibernate is to save thruster fuel.
    • 3JPLW 9y ago
      It's not obvious to me why the two (spin-stabilization and hibernation) would have to be coupled. Could it be due to antennas that are required for communication during active mission control? That said, there's a whole lot of nothing out there. It makes sense to put the craft into a safer mode that has less risk of failure when there's nothing for it to do.
      • barkingcat 9y ago
        Most likely while spin stabilizing, many instrument packages that require some kind of orientation are useless, so it's better to turn them off - and also, to save their operational lifetimes (if something has a certain # hours of operating life it makes sense to turn them off to save life)