Science
NASA
The New Horizons spacecraft has made it to Pluto.
NASA scientists shouted, cheered and gave a standing ovation early Tuesday morning as they gathered in the control room at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to view the sharpest images of Pluto ever seen, as transmitted just before the New Horizon spacecraft’s historic flyby of the planet.
NASA said New Horizons hit its mark at 7:49 a.m. EDT Tuesday, traveling at at 31,000 mph and reaching within 7,800 miles of the icy planet, a moment that it broadcasted live on TV from flight operations in Maryland.
Confirmation of the mission's success came Tuesday night, 13 hours after the actual flyby.
Early indications had been encouraging, and a cheering, flag-waving celebration swept over the mission operations center in Maryland at the time of closest approach Tuesday morning. But until New Horizons phoned home Tuesday night, there was no guarantee the spacecraft had buzzed the small, icy, faraway — but no longer unknown — world.
"We have a healthy spacecraft. We've recorded data of the Pluto system and we're outbound from Pluto," announced mission operations director Alice Bowman.
"This is truly a hallmark in human history," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's science mission chief, on Tuesday morning.
The spacecraft's flyby was the culmination of an unprecedented journey spanning 9 ½ years and 3 billion miles. Scientists expressed wonder and excitement at a press conference Tuesday morning.
“I have to pinch myself,” said Bowman, missions operation manager for Johns Hopkins APL, which has supervised the Pluto mission since its inception. “Look at what we accomplished. It’s truly amazing that humankind can go out and explore these worlds, and to see Pluto revealed just before our eyes, it’s just fantastic.”
New Horizons is taking pictures of Pluto, its jumbo moon Charon and its four little moons during this critical close encounter, but it will not transmit images back to Earth just yet. It takes 4½ hours for signals to travel one-way at the speed of light between New Horizons and flight controllers.
“I haven’t had very much sleep,” Bowman said. “I am feeling a little bit nervous, just like you do when you set your child off, but I have absolute confidence that it’s going to do what it needs to do.”
On Wednesday NASA will start providing what it has called a “data waterfall,” when New Horizons begins transmitting more detailed images of topographical and atmospheric data at a thousand times the resolution of NASA’s most powerful instrument, the Hubble telescope. The spacecraft will continue to transmit data over the next 16 months.
The latest images of the planet released Tuesday show a planet that is about 1,500 miles in diameter, around 18.5 percent the size of Earth, with various regions of snow on the surface and signs of impacts in the form of chasms and craters. Some color data was already transmitted to the ground before the flyby, which NASA said would be revealed later in the day.
“There’s a little bit of drama because this is true exploration,” said Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, the principal investigator for the mission. “New Horizon is flying into the unknown.”
The United States is now the only nation to visit every single planet in the solar system. Pluto was No. 9 in the lineup when New Horizons departed Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2006 to shed light on the mysterious icy world, but was demoted seven months later to dwarf status.
With The Associated Press
NASA's New Horizons will pass by Pluto on Tuesday capturing first-ever pictures after a journey of almost a decade
NASA unveils map days before New Horizons spacecraft set to make closest-ever flyby of the dwarf planet
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