NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft gets up close and personal with Pluto

His work involved thousands of hours spent pouring over millions of images of stars, according to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which is managing the New Horizons mission for NASA.

New Horizons’ 3 billion-mile, 9½-year journey from Cape Canaveral, Florida, culminates Tuesday morning when the spacecraft zooms within 7,767 miles of Pluto at 31,000 miles per hour.

If New Horizons stays healthy during its flyby, it might get funding for an extended mission.

“It’s the end of the era, the closing of the first era of the reconnaissance of our Solar System”.

Later today, the New Horizons probe will speed past the icy world, hopefully beaming back the most detailed pictures of its surface which have ever been taken.

The moment of closest approach for the New Horizons spacecraft came at 7:49 a.m. EDT Tuesday.

“That [message] is going to be a very highly anticipated event because it’s going to be sort of putting the cherry on top”, Alan Stern, principal investigator for the mission, said Monday in a NASA news briefing.

Data received by the spacecraft also led researchers to believe Pluto is comprised of more ice than originally believed and has a shallower atmosphere than expected. For example, data gathered by the probe has revealed the true size of the dwarf planet, suggesting that it is a bit larger than estimated compared to earlier measurements.

As said by Google, today’s Pluto flyby doodle is meant to celebrate the unprecedented encounter with Pluto at the edge of the solar system. It recently measured Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, so NASA could release an image to demonstrate how big they are compared to our planet.

Before the flyby, New Horizons had already answered one long-standing riddle over Pluto-just how big it is.

NASA/Eyes on the Solar SystemIn the live view, the main window shows the spacecraft, Pluto, Pluto’s moon Charon, and few other objects farther out in the Kuiper belt.

The excitement for the New Horizons mission radiates out of its base in Maryland. Pluto is in the Kuiper Belt, and this is the first time a spacecraft has entered the area. This unknown territory is a shooting gallery of comets and other small bodies.