They did it!  It worked!  Success!

New Horizons has re-established contact with Earth.  The mission worked!  Bring on the close up pics!  Pluto!

Well, New Horizons had it’s closest encounter with Pluto.  It happened a couple of hours ago.  All of the probes systems were tied up with it’s observations, so there was no communication with Earth during the flyby.  That, plus the 4-5 hours it takes for messages to cross the 3 billion or so miles to Earth, means we won’t know for sure that everything worked until late this evening.  I read somewhere that we don’t expect to receive any data until 8-9 O’Clock tonight.  We know the spacecraft made it to Pluto.  We won’t know for a while yet if it successfully completed it’s objectives.  There is always a chance some thing could have gone wrong.  Fingers crossed that everything went fine.  For now, I will just wait impatiently for some news.

The New Horizons spacecraft is about 200 million kilometers from Pluto and NASA released a new image today. You can see Pluto and Charon. You can’t see much, but you can see them. We’re almost there!

Click the image to see the article from which the image was taken.

Pluto! We’re coming!