Pluto up close: Spacecraft achieves flyby, then calls home

At 9 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, the spacecraft sent messages back to mission operations at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, confirming it had completed its mission, ending nerve-wracking hours for the craft’s operators on Earth. “While this historic event is still unfolding -with the most exciting Pluto science still ahead of us – a new era of solar system exploration is just beginning. It will also study other objects in the Kuiper Belt.

The piano-sized probe will spend the next 16 months transmitting data from back to Earth from its encounter with Pluto, with the information being categorized by low, medium and high priority.

One thing the early photos do show is that Pluto’s geography is more interesting than originally thought and that its tectonic plates (or its crust) are shifting more than ever.

Scientists in charge of the $720 million mission hope the new observations will restore Pluto’s honor.

“We lost the signal as planned at 11:17 p.m. Eastern and there is nothing we could do but trust we had prepared it well to set off on its journey on its own”, said Alice Bowman, New Horizons’ mission operations manager.

By the time New Horizons runs out of gas, it could be 100 times further from Earth than our planet is from the Sunday. Pluto has a rocky interior and a significant atmosphere.

The New Horizons spacecraft was launched with equipment that could calculate the exact size of Pluto, detect magnetic fields on Pluto and her moon Charon, and possibly find additional satellites or rings near Pluto and her moons.

The team also released two stretched colour images, of Pluto and its main moon, Charon. No science data will come down during Tuesday night’s pass.

When I asked Scott Kenyon about his reaction to the news that New Horizons had actually flown by Pluto, his answer wasn’t that different from those of the myriad of people I’ve chatted with about it, from scientists to educators to regular Janes and Joes. In it, he talks about the real New Horizons mission, while simultaneously sending his own digital equivalent into the inky void.

A crowd gathers to watch as the New Horizons spacecraft makes its closest approach to Pluto on Tuesday. Collectively, these collected data on Pluto’s geological history, the composition and temperature of the dwarf planet’s surface and atmosphere and the escape rate of matter from Pluto and its moons.

In the days approaching Pluto, the Long Range Reconnaissance Instrument was also able to determine that Pluto has a polar ice cap made of methane and nitrogen. Pluto has strong atmospheric cycles. Pluto was reclassified as a “dwarf planet” after the discovery of other Pluto-like spheres orbiting in the Kuiper Belt, the region beyond the eighth planet, Neptune.