LAUREL: The call everyone was waiting for is in. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft phoned home just before 9 p.m. EDT Tuesday to tell the mission team and the world it had accomplished the historic first-ever flyby of Pluto.
A 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.
“I know we have inspired a new generation of explorers,” says @NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. pic.twitter.com/kPPF74ZriD
— NASA New Horizons (@NASANewHorizons) July 15, 2015
New Horizons had been instructed to spend the day gathering the maximum amount of data, and not communicating with Earth until it was beyond the Pluto system.
“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. NASA missions will unravel the mysteries of Mars, Jupiter, Europa and worlds around other suns in the coming years.”
Pluto just had its first visitor! Thanks @NASA – it’s a great day for discovery and American leadership. pic.twitter.com/FfztBSMbK0
— President Obama (@POTUS) July 15, 2015
Although Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006 – just months after New Horizons set off on its mission – Charles Bolden, Nasa’s chief administrator, said he hoped that decision would be reconsidered.
The New Horizons spacecraft had passed by Pluto and its five moons at 7.49am EDT (12.49 BST/9.49pm AEST) on Tuesday. It spent the following eight hours continuing to collect data and images from the last major unexplored body in the universe, before sending out its signal home.
