Washington : NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which got humanity’s first up-close look at Pluto, has “phoned home” from nearly three billion miles away confirming that its historic flyby of the dwarf planet was indeed a success, and ending a 21-hour period of gruelling suspense for scientists.
The New Horizons spacecraft phoned home Tuesday night to tell the mission team and the world it had accomplished the historic first-ever flyby of Pluto, NASA said. “I know today we’ve inspired a whole new generation of explorers with this great success, and we look forward to the discoveries yet to come,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said.
“This is a historic win for science and for exploration. We’ve truly, once again raised the bar of human potential,” said Bolden.
The preprogrammed “phone call” – a 15-minute series of status messages beamed back to mission operations at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland through NASA’s Deep Space Network – ended a very suspenseful 21-hour waiting period, the US space agency said.
“With the successful flyby of Pluto we are celebrating the capstone event in a golden age of planetary exploration,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “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,” said Grunsfeld.