It hit up Pluto at around 7:50 a.m. EST, with scientists gathered at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland to celebrate the close approach. This is going to be unbelievable”, said Dr. Dan Riskin, Anchor, Pluto: “First Encounter And Co-Host Of Daily Planet on Discovery, in a statement.
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New images of Pluto have arrived from a NASA space probe, and they’re already allowing scientists to update what we know about the dwarf planet – such as its size. During its approach to Pluto, New Horizons scouted for any unsafe debris out there that could wipe out the mission.
The spacecraft is so far away that radio signals, traveling at the speed of light, take about four and a half hours to reach Earth. This is essentially the spacecraft’s way of saying it’s doing just fine.
“To see Pluto be revealed just before our eyes, it’s just fantastic”, said mission operations manager Alice Bowman. CDSCC will receive a message from New Horizons Wednesday morning if Tuesday’s mission is successful.
The closeup pictures and measurements of Pluto will take some time to reach Earth.
Original story: After a journey that has lasted the better part of a decade, the answer to “are we there yet” is finally “yes”, for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. “This is the risk we take with all kinds of exploration”.
A compressed data set will also be sent back down to the Earth. “New Horizons is flying into the unknown”.
And here’s a video by science journalist and producer, Kate Tobin, on Pluto’s moon, Charon. The north pole of Charon is unexpectedly dark, while Pluto’s is bright with ice.
New Horizons will turn its antenna back toward Earth around 4:20 pm Tuesday to send a message that it survived and a brief summary of how the day went.
The first spacecraft to visit an unexplored planet since the NASA Voyager missions of the 1970s will be busy snapping pictures and collecting data, and will phone home later.
When New Horizons was launched in 2006 Pluto was still considered the solar system’s ninth planet but was shortly after demoted to the status of “dwarf planet”. The goal of the Pluto New Horizons mission is to understand the formation of the Pluto system, the Kuiper Belt and the transformation of the early Solar System.
Pluto circles the sun every 248 years in a highly tilted orbit that creates radical changes from season to season. It weighed 1,054 pounds (478 kilograms) at launch.
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Stern said he’s waiting to get more data on topography and color before drawing too many conclusions about the surface of Pluto.
