After more than 9 years and over 3 billion miles, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made history on Tuesday, July 14, 2015 at 6:49 a.m. CDT when it flew past dwarf planet Pluto, marking humankind’s first close up visit to this cold, unexplored world in our solar system.
Hello #Pluto! We’re at closest approach. Congrats to all! Follow our story & view new images using #PlutoFlyby. pic.twitter.com/8JVlJrcUkY
— NASA New Horizons (@NASANewHorizons) July 14, 2015
“I have to pinch myself. Look at what we’ve accomplished. It is truly amazing that humankind can go out and explore these worlds. I can’t wait until we get these images down starting early tomorrow morning,” said Alice Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
“I’m delighted at this latest accomplishment by NASA, another first that demonstrates once again how the United States leads the world in space,” said John Holdren, assistant to the President for Science and Technology and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “New Horizons is the latest in a long line of scientific accomplishments at NASA, including multiple missions orbiting and exploring the surface of Mars in advance of human visits still to come; the remarkable Kepler mission to identify Earth-like planets around stars other than our own; and the DSCOVR satellite that soon will be beaming back images of the whole Earth in near real-time from a vantage point a million miles away. As New Horizons completes its flyby of Pluto and continues deeper into the Kuiper Belt, NASA’s multifaceted journey of discovery continues.”
See Also: Juno Spacecraft Slips Into Orbit Around Jupiter
“The exploration of Pluto and its moons by New Horizons represents the capstone event to 50 years of planetary exploration by NASA and the United States,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “Once again we have achieved a historic first. The United States is the first nation to reach Pluto, and with this mission has completed the initial survey of our solar system, a remarkable accomplishment that no other nation can match.”
Just recently, NASA officials decided to extend New Horizons’ mission so the spacecraft can fly onward to an object deeper in the Kuiper Belt, known as 2014 MU69. The spacecraft’s planned rendezvous with the ancient object – considered one of the early building blocks of the solar system — is Jan. 1, 2019.
“The New Horizons mission to Pluto exceeded our expectations and even today the data from the spacecraft continue to surprise,” said NASA’s Director of Planetary Science Jim Green. “We’re excited to continue onward into the dark depths of the outer solar system to a science target that wasn’t even discovered when the spacecraft launched.”
But why study an object that’s about one billion miles farther away from Pluto?
According to Alex Parker, one of the people responsible for the discovery of 2014 MU69, the object “belongs to the ‘Cold Classical’ Kuiper Belt, a population that appears to be a surviving remnant of the disk of material from which the planets formed. The cold classicals seem to have escaped much of the violent processing that other kinds of minor planets were subject to. This makes 2014 MU69 the clearest window into the era of planet formation that we have ever had the chance to see up close.”
Recommended Reading: 3 Questions – Richard Binzel on what we’ve learned so far from New Horizons (MIT News)
See Also: Surprises From The Heart Of The Orion Nebula
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