“We have a healthy spacecraft. We’ve recorded data of the Pluto system and we’re out of bound from Pluto,” New Horizons Mission Operations Manager (MOM) Alice Bowman announced after flight controllers confirmed the signals relayed by New Horizons.
It took the spacecraft more than nine years to travel the 3 billion miles to Pluto, which until Tuesday was the largest piece of unexplored real estate in the solar system.
Scientists and mission managers then had to wait another 13 hours after the spacecraft’s 7:49 a.m. ET close approach to learn if it survived the encounter. There was a 1-in-10,000 chance that a debris strike would destroy it.
“How often do we unlock the secrets of a new world? We did that today. How cool is that?” said Mark Holdridge, the New Horizons encounter mission manager.
“Your team made history today,” NASA’s associate administrator for science John Grunsfeld said after New Horizons phoned home.
New Horizons went right back to work, photographing and taking measurements of the backlit sides of Pluto and its primary moon Charon.
On Wednesday New Horizons will begin transmitting close-up pictures and science data collected during its 31,000 mph blitz past Pluto and its five moons. The images should be 10 times better resolution than what New Horizons transmitted in the hours leading up to its close encounter.
“We haven’t seen anything yet,” Grunsfeld said.
It will take New Horizons more than a year to empty its data recorders. The spacecraft, which is about the size of a piano, doesn’t carry the fuel to fire braking rockets and put itself into orbit around Pluto, so all its science was conducted on the fly, a throwback to NASA’s early exploration days of the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
Read more at Discovery News
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