WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - NASA has received a crucial signal from the New Horizons spacecraft confirming that it survived its historic encounter with Pluto. After a decade-long journey through the solar system, New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto Tuesday.
The call that was eagerly awaited came in just before 9 p.m. EDT Tuesday. New Horizons phoned home to tell the mission team and the world it had accomplished the first-ever flyby of Pluto, and that the spacecraft is in good health.
Because New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft ever launched, hurtling through the Pluto system at more than 30,000 mph, there was a possibility that a collision with a particle as small as a grain of rice could incapacitate the spacecraft.
When New Horizons sped past at 14 kilometers per second about 7,750 miles above the surface of Pluto - roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai - of 2,370km-wide Pluto, it marked a key moment in the history of space exploration.
The three-billion-mile journey was the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth.
The pre-programmed 'phone call' -- a 15-minute series of status messages beamed back to flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland through NASA's Deep Space Network -- ended a very suspenseful 21-hour waiting period. 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.
'Pluto just had its first visitor! Thanks @NASA - it's a great day for discovery and American leadership,' US President Barack Obama said on Twitter.
'With this mission, we have visited every single planet in the Solar System,' said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.
Professor Stephen Hawking, regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in history, congratulated the NASA New Horizons team.
Pluto was discovered just 85 years ago by Clyde Tombaugh, a farmer's son from Kansas. James Christy, who discovered Pluto's moon Charon, joined relatives of Tombaugh at the mission control to witness receipt of the signal.
New Horizons' flyby of the dwarf planet and its five known moons is providing an up-close introduction to the solar system's Kuiper Belt, an outer region populated by icy objects ranging in size from boulders to dwarf planets. Kuiper Belt objects, such as Pluto, preserve evidence about the early formation of the solar system.
Pluto is the first Kuiper Belt object visited by a mission from Earth.
New Horizons was launched in January 2006. Its nearly 10-year, three-billion-mile journey to closest approach at Pluto took about one minute less than predicted.
The spacecraft is collecting so much data that it will take 16 months to send it all back to Earth.
New Horizons is the latest in a long line of scientific research and discovery that is providing information valuable in NASA's plan to send American astronauts to Mars in the 2030's.
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