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1st LD: New Horizons' Pluto flyby makes history

Xinhua, July 14, 2015 Adjust font size:

The New Horizons spacecraft has performed the first-ever flyby of Pluto, making the closest approach to the planet at 7:49 a.m. EDT (1149 GMT) Tuesday, the U.S. space agency said.

"Hello Pluto! We're at closest approach. Congrats to all!" said the mission team on New Horizons's Twitter account.

To celebrate, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) unveiled the latest photo of Pluto, showing a reddish world with a stunning heart-shaped feature on its surface.

After Tuesday's flyby, all nine of the solar system's recognized planets have now been visited by a spacecraft.

The piano-sized probe, which was launched in 2006, has traveled about 4.77 billion km to reach Pluto. But the probe won't orbit nor land on Pluto. Instead, it will keep flying, journeying deeper into the Kuiper Belt, a region that scientists think is filled with hundreds of small, icy objects. Endi