WATCH: There were cheers and some tears as New Horizons successfully called into mission control in Laurel, Maryland to let them know that everything was fine and the mission was on track.
LAUREL, MD – At 7:49 a.m. at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, the gathered crowd of hundreds erupted with cheers.
New Horizons, the fastest spacecraft to ever leave Earth — at a mind-blowing 55,000 km/h — successfully made its closest flyby of Pluto, the closest any spacecraft has come to the small world more than five billion km from home.
READ MORE: Little Pluto bigger than scientists thought as flyby looms
Or at least, that’s what they had hoped — because New Horizons hadn’t confirmed it.
But around 9 p.m. Tuesday, New Horizons phoned home and let its team know that everything was okay.
The auditorium, rising to their feet, some in tears, began to cheer.
As each system confirmed nominal status — indicating success — more cheers and hollers erupted.
In Photos: Images of Pluto reveal complex world
Finally, the words everyone wanted to hear: “PI, we have a healthy spacecraft…and we’re outbound for Pluto.”
That was a huge relief to the team of scientists and engineers who have been working on the mission for most of their lives.
“You put the right people together and give them a challenge and great things happen,” Glen Fountain, New Horizons project manager told a crowd yesterday.
And, indeed, those people are getting their just rewards.
At a gathering of media and mission members and friends and family, Alan Stern, New Horizons principle investigator smiled and looked up at the image of Pluto taken on July 13, and said, “How about a round of applause for that beautiful planet?”
The room erupted in cheers and hollers.
Now, the science team will begin its collection of data and send it back home slowly — which will continue well into 2016. Over more than a year, the team will begin to analyze the data and try to unravel the mysteries that lie within this small world.
Already, Pluto has surprised astronomers and scientists with how diverse its terrain is. And its largest moon, Charon, is also a mystery. In exaggerated colour images of the moon that is half the size of its planet, it’s evident that there is a dark, reddish deposit at its pole, something that might be a result of Pluto’s very thin atmosphere being lost into space.
“Pluto has turned out to be an extraordinarily interesting and complex world,” said NASA’s associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate John Grunsfeld.
“Tonight, indeed, your team made history,” Grunsfeld said to Stern at a press conference following the good news.
“Share this as much as you can,” Grunsfeld told the gathered crowd. “Because this is a tremendous moment in history.”
Stern asked the New Horizons team members within the crowd to stand.
“To you, I just have three words: We did it,” he said.
The images of Pluto at its closest and most detailed are expected to begin arriving on Wednesday morning. These photographs will be significantly better than the images we’ve seen thus far. And it is with bated breath that the scientists — who hope to gain a better understanding of its geology and its formation — as well as the public, will be waiting.
And in what may be the true final chapter in the life and death of Pluto’s discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh — who only saw Pluto as a small, faint point of light in the sky — he is the only person to have discovered a planet and actually visited it: some of his ashes made the five billion-kilometre voyage to Pluto. Though he may have not been put at rest on Pluto, he will continue on into space into the vast area where he discovered the first world of its kind in the outer fringes of our solar system.
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