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A historic moment in space exploration was recorded at 7:49 a.m. Tuesday as the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed by Pluto at its closest proximity since it launched nine years ago.
But its journey isn’t over yet.
As planned, scientists lost contact with New Horizons last Monday and won’t reconnect until 9 p.m. Tuesday, when it phones home with a burst of data and photographs.
In a press briefing after the flyby, Principal Investigator Alan Stern said that while New Horizons appears to be doing its job as expected, there is still some nail biting going on.
“(New Horizons) will transit back to the Earth at about 9 p.m. and tell us whether it survived the passage through the Pluto system, but there is still a little bit of drama,” Stern said. “This is true exploration. New Horizons is flying into the unknown, then we will get a 16-month data waterfall.”
NASA released the best image it has of Pluto on Tuesday morning, but Stern said a picture with 10 times the detail could be received on Wednesday.
The data will come in at between 1,000 and 4,000 bits per second.
Stern said he’s waiting to get more data on topography and color before drawing too many conclusions about the surface of Pluto. But, he said, early images appear to show Pluto’s moon Charon with more cratering, indicating that it might be older.
“This is clearly a world where both climatology and geology (play) a role,” Stern said.
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