After a wait, spacecraft confirms that it survived its close pass of Pluto
http://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...cb0f04-2a1f-11e5-bd33-395c05608059_story.html
New Horizons spacecraft phoned home Tuesday night, reporting that it had made it to Pluto and beyond after crossing the solar system for 9.5 years. To the immense relief of the men and women who had built it and then flung it into deep space, the robotic probe sent a brief stream of data, received shortly before 9 p.m., confirming that it had survived the close pass of the dwarf planet.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reached Pluto on Tuesday after crossing the solar system for nine and a half years, inciting a day-long celebration that stretched into the evening as scientists and engineers awaited the crucial “I-survived” message from the robotic probe.
On its approach to Pluto, the spacecraft obtained the most arresting image yet of the dwarf planet. Pluto is not a bland and featureless ball of ice, but rather a complex, variegated, mottled world with broad snowfields, structures that look like cliffs or fault lines, and a strikingly bright heart-shaped area that could be the eroded remnant of a giant impact crater.
Cheers erupted at 7:50 a.m. Tuesday at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the home of the mission, as a countdown clock ticked to zero, signifying the spacecraft’s closest approach to Pluto’s surface, about 7,750 miles.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...cb0f04-2a1f-11e5-bd33-395c05608059_story.html
New Horizons spacecraft phoned home Tuesday night, reporting that it had made it to Pluto and beyond after crossing the solar system for 9.5 years. To the immense relief of the men and women who had built it and then flung it into deep space, the robotic probe sent a brief stream of data, received shortly before 9 p.m., confirming that it had survived the close pass of the dwarf planet.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reached Pluto on Tuesday after crossing the solar system for nine and a half years, inciting a day-long celebration that stretched into the evening as scientists and engineers awaited the crucial “I-survived” message from the robotic probe.
On its approach to Pluto, the spacecraft obtained the most arresting image yet of the dwarf planet. Pluto is not a bland and featureless ball of ice, but rather a complex, variegated, mottled world with broad snowfields, structures that look like cliffs or fault lines, and a strikingly bright heart-shaped area that could be the eroded remnant of a giant impact crater.
Cheers erupted at 7:50 a.m. Tuesday at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the home of the mission, as a countdown clock ticked to zero, signifying the spacecraft’s closest approach to Pluto’s surface, about 7,750 miles.