Big Day for Little Pluto: Probe Makes Flyby

After tearing through space for 9.5 years, putting 3 billion miles on its odometer, NASA’s low-cost New Horizons spacecraft made it past Pluto, the last major unexplored piece of real estate in the solar system -- or so scientists hope.

Confirmation that New Horizons survived its brush by Pluto and its five known moons won’t come until 8:53 p.m. EDT Tuesday. But that didn’t stop the celebrations at New Horizons mission control center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab outside Baltimore.

“It’s truly a mark in human history,” said NASA’s associate administrator for science John Grunsfeld. “It’s been an incredible voyage.”

As New Horizons approached Pluto, scientists began realizing they were looking at a far more active world than initially imagined. The probe relayed its closest view yet on Monday before going into radio silence for the flyby. NASA released the image on Tuesday.

“What we’ve seen already from Pluto is that it’s a complex, interesting world,” Grunsfeld told reporters after the flyby.

With 99 percent of New Horizons flyby data still onboard the spacecraft, mission managers and scientists have a nervous wait ahead.

“Hopefully it survived the passage, we’re counting on that,” said lead scientist Alan Stern, with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

New Horizons was on track to fly within 7,750 miles of Pluto at 7:49 a.m. EDT. Mission operations manager Alice Bowman said the latest data from the spacecraft showed it would arrive 72 seconds early, well within the targeted time for the planned encounter.

From Discovery News