We made it to Pluto: New Horizons spacecraft phones home after flyby

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Pluto-thumb-final Image: NASA/APL/SwRI
A photo of Pluto taken by New Horizons on July 13, 2015.

LAUREL, Maryland — Humanity's first robotic emissary to Pluto has successfully phoned home and appears to be in good health after its close encounter with the dwarf planet earlier today.

Mission controllers received a status update from NASA's New Horizons probe as expected, at about 8:53 p.m. ET Tuesday, approximately 11 hours after its close flyby with Pluto.

"We have a healthy spacecraft. We've recorded data of the pluto system and we're outbound from Pluto," New Horizons mission operations manager Alice Bowman said they they received a signal from the craft.

"I can't express how i feel ... just like we planned it, just like we practiced. We did it. It's great."

The news of a healthy craft was met with cheers and a standing ovation here at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab.

New Horizon's signal home marks the end of the mission controllers' long, anxious wait for New Horizons to get back in touch after its close pass.

It also marks a major milestone for the spacecraft, which launched in 2006 and flew more than 3 billion miles to meet up with Pluto today, and for humanity, since this mission completes NASA's initial reconnaissance of the solar system.

The craft was purposefully out of touch with the ground as it flew past Pluto and its moons. In order to make the most of the short time it had near the small world and its five moons, scientists directed the craft to focus all its resources on collecting science, and will now set about the months' long process of receiving and analyzing that data.

We've come a long way since Pluto's discovery in 1930, thanks to @NASANewHorizons #PlutoFlyby: http://t.co/ju1rVhu14o pic.twitter.com/pl5AbEaL1k

— NASA (@NASA) July 14, 2015

NASA plans to release the first high resolution close up views online on Wednesday, and those images will likely be far more detailed and perhaps more widely-shared Pluto heart image released on Tuesday. This image was taken on July 13, when the probe was still 476,000 miles away.

There were reasons to be concerned about the spacecraft's health on Tuesday, since there was about a 1-in-10,000 chance that the craft could collide with space debris while it flew past the dwarf planet and its moons, New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern told the press on Tuesday morning.

The flyby only took a few minutes for New Horizons. It was traveling at more than 30,000 mph as it passed about 7,750 miles from the surface of the small planet, collecting images that will bring the cliffs, crags and craters of Pluto and its moons into better focus than ever before.

New Horizons sent its last pre-flyby signal at about 11:17 p.m. ET on Tuesday, and from then on, it was dark by design. People working on the mission were, understandably, tense while sitting through the long wait for New Horizons.

New Horizons Pluto Flyby

Image: NASA/Bill Ingalls

A view from the Mission Operations Center a few hours before the New Horizons team hoped to receive confirmation from the spacecraft that it has completed the flyby of Pluto Tuesday, July 14, 2015 at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

"There were a lot of us in the [mission operations center] even though we knew the spacecraft wouldn't be talking to us, but we were there. We wanted to be with it as it went through this journey," New Horizons mission operations manager Alice Bowman said during a news conference after the flyby time.

But, this flyby isn't the end for New Horizons. The spacecraft now has to beam home all of the information it collected during the close flyby, which should take more than a year.

What we've learned already

Scientists are excited to see what New Horizons discovered during its flyby, but the spacecraft has already beamed home some amazing, unprecedented information about the dwarf planet and its moons.

New Horizons has settled the Pluto size debate once and for all, finding that pluto is slightly larger — and therefore probably a bit more icy — than initially estimated. The spacecraft has also revealed surface features of the small planet that have never been seen before including the imagination-capturing heart-shaped splotch.

pluto-charon-2

Image: NASA/APL/SwRI

Pluto (left) and its largest moon Charon (right) in false color seen by NASA's New Horizons on July 13.

New Horizons is now on its way deeper into the Kuiper Belt — a group of icy objects past the orbit of Neptune — where it might encounter yet another world by 2019, assuming it continues to get funding.

This also marks a personal moment for the children of Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer that discovered Pluto in 1930. Some of their father's ashes are actually flying in space aboard New Horizons.

"We're really children of Pluto in a lot of ways, because if there weren't Pluto, dad wouldn't have discovered Pluto," Annette Tombaugh, Clyde's daughter, said Tuesday.

"If he didn't discover Pluto, he wouldn't have gotten a college scholarship, and if he didn't get the college scholarship, then he wouldn't have met my mother, and we [Annette and her brother Alden] wouldn't be here. Thank you, Pluto. That's why it has a heart on it."

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