NASA’s probe reaches Pluto

After more than nine years and a 3 billion mile journey, NASA’s New Horizon mission spacecraft has made its closest approach to Pluto.

The probe captured the most detailed images of the dwarf planet and is currently in data-gathering mode.

“The New Horizons team is proud to have accomplished the first exploration of the Pluto system. This mission has inspired people across the world with the excitement of exploration and what humankind can achieve,” said research leader Dr Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado.

Scientists have now received a signal from the spacecraft that it has survived the flyby. Once it re-established contact just after midnight, it started to download data but it will take 16 months for the spacecraft to send its entire cache of data back to Earth.

Project manager Glen Fountain at Applied Physical Laboratory said: “After nearly 15 years of planning, building, and flying the New Horizons spacecraft across the solar system, we’ve reached our goal. The bounty of what we’ve collected is about to unfold.”

By using the acquired data and the images in recent weeks, researchers have been attempting to interpret the observations on approach to the dwarf planet.

“On the surface we see a history of impacts, we see a history of surface activity in terms of some features we might be able to interpret as tectonic - indicating internal activity on the planet at some point in its past, and maybe even in its present,” said Dr Stern.

Mission scientists from NASA have already revealed the size of Pluto to be 2,370 km in diameter by using images acquired with the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), an instrument on board of the New Horizon’s mission. This confirmed that Pluto is larger than all other known solar system objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. Observations from LORRI have also confirmed previous estimates of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, to be 1208 km across.

New Horizons will continue its adventure deeper into the Kuiper Belt.