Decade long space voyage unveils closest ever images of Pluto

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto on the morning of Tuesday the 14th July capturing history’s first up-close view of the extreme distant world.

This closest approach at 11:49 am GMT is humankind’s first vivid view of this icy, uncharted world in our solar system.

New Horizons was launched in 19 January 2006 and has traveled 4.88 billion kilometers to the solar system´s uttermost reaches.

To celebrate, NASA released the newest color image of Pluto, which was sent down from the New Horizons probe and offers the clearest view yet of an icy world with streaks of red almost like Mars.

The New Horizons team had gathered at the mission control at the Johns Hopkins University applied physics laboratory in Maryland.

They were joined by Relatives of Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930. James Christy, who discovered Pluto’s moon Charon, was also present to witness this new historical development.

Other than sending down images, NASA’s New Horizons mission has also determined Pluto’s size with mission scientists finding Pluto to be 12,370 kilometers in diameter. This is larger than previous estimates of the size of the dwarf planet.

Travelling at about 49,600 Kilometers per hour, the unmanned probe whizzed past Pluto and now Mission scientist eagerly anticipate signal feedback from the craft revealing more data.

Any kind of debris at the path of space probe would have been fatal to the craft due to its high 14 kilometers per second velocity.

However that swift scouting has transformed Pluto from a blurry dot discovered 85 years ago into a richly textured world. This provides an insight into the beginnings of the solar system and new leads to fresh mysteries that astronomers will muse over for years to come.

Images acquired with the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were used to make this determination. This result confirms an assumption that Pluto is larger than all other known solar system objects beyond the orbit of Neptune.

It is expected that by end of Wednesday, the spacecraft will have mostly finished with the data-collecting stage of the mission. It will now embark in sending back streams of data for scientists to analyze.

More data will arrive on Earth, including sharper images of Pluto with higher resolution than the image released on Tuesday.

The success of the mission means that humankind has now explored every single planet in our solar system.