A spectacular trip

Close-ups of Pluto prove well worth the long wait

Sometimes all it takes is a quick call home to assure folks that everything is alright. After a nine-year, 3 billion-mile journey that would take it within 7,750 miles of Pluto, that’s what NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft did.

The planned 12-hour communications blackout was unnerving for NASA scientists and engineers waiting for confirmation that New Horizons hadn’t encountered disaster during the last leg of its historic flyby of the dwarf planet.

Fortunately, all the angst was unnecessary. The beautiful close-up images of Pluto that New Horizons began transmitting on Wednesday brought to a close the most dangerous phase of one of the most wildly successful unmanned adventures in NASA’s history.

It is breathtaking to realize that a spacecraft traveling at 31,000 mph made it through billions of miles of space and ultimately to Pluto’s moon-crowded neighborhood without colliding into a single pebblesized object that could have destroyed it or compromised its mission. That is a miracle in itself.

Humanity also caught a lucky break from the fact that Pluto isn’t cloud-covered. Other than snowy areas at the poles, it is a beige world with youthful mountain ranges, methane ice and active weather patterns. It is also bigger than we once thought, though only by a mere 50 miles, so its dwarf planet status is likely to remain a debated topic for now.

For the next 16 months, New Horizons will continue to transmit images from its flyby of Pluto. It is fitting that this encounter is happening 50 years after the Mariner probe’s historic Mars flyby. The Pluto mission marks the end of America’s quest to survey all of our solar system’s major (and minor) planets, but its long-range mission to poke around the outer edges of the solar system continues.

New Horizons is poised for a journey deep into the Kuiper Belt, where tens of thousands of minor planets are believed to exist. We have no map for where the probe is going or what it will encounter. In a few years it will be beyond radio contact, so the time we have with it now is precious.

Should it encounter something truly spectacular out there, NASA wouldn’t mind another call home, even if it is collect.