NASA's New Horizons reaches Pluto for historic encounter

After a decade-long journey through our solar system, NASA's New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto on Tuesday, about 7,750 miles above the surface - roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai, India - making it the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth.

''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.

NASA has also accomplished 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, it will continue deeper into the Kuiper Belt, on NASA's multifaceted journey of discovery, NASA stated in a release.

''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.''

The spacecraft currently is in data-gathering mode and not in contact with flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physical Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. Scientists are waiting to find out whether New Horizons ''phones home,'' transmitting to Earth a series of status updates that indicate the spacecraft survived the flyby and is in good health. The ''call'' is expected shortly after 9 pm tonight.

The Pluto story began only a generation ago when young Clyde Tombaugh was tasked to look for Planet X, theorised to exist beyond the orbit of Neptune. He discovered a faint point of light that we now see as a complex and fascinating world.

"Pluto was discovered just 85 years ago by a farmer's son from Kansas, inspired by a visionary from Boston, using a telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona,'' said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "Today, science takes a great leap observing the Pluto system up close and flying into a new frontier that will help us better understand the origins of the solar system.''

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.

New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, says the mission now is writing the textbook on Pluto.

"The New Horizons team is proud to have accomplished the first exploration of the Pluto system,'' Stern said. ''This mission has inspired people across the world with the excitement of exploration and what humankind can achieve.''

New Horizons' almost 10-year, three-billion-mile journey to closest approach at Pluto took about one minute less than predicted when the craft was launched in January 2006. The spacecraft threaded the needle through a 36-by-57 mile (60 by 90 kilometers) window in space - the equivalent of a commercial airliner arriving no more off target than the width of a tennis ball.

Because New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft ever launched - hurtling through the Pluto system at more than 30,000 mph, a collision with a particle as small as a grain of rice could incapacitate the spacecraft. Once it reestablishes contact tonight, it will take 16 months for New Horizons to send its cache of data - 10 years' worth - back to Earth.

New Horizons, the multiple rovers exploring the surface of Mars, the Cassini spacecraft that revolutionised our understanding of Saturn and the Hubble Space Telescope, will all help the agency to make an informed plan to send American astronauts to Mars in the 2030s.

''After nearly 15 years of planning, building, and flying the New Horizons spacecraft across the solar system, we've reached our goal,'' said project manager Glen Fountain at APL ''The bounty of what we've collected is about to unfold.''

APL designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the mission, science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.