Off the wire
• Chinese designers to join this year's WOW competition  • S. Korea posts trade surplus for 41 months  • Myanmar state airline to launch 1st int'l flight to Singapore  • China welcomes UN Libya deal  • 2nd LD-Writethru: China's H1 industrial output up 6.3 pct  • 1st LD: Chinese shares tumble during morning session  • 2nd LD: China's GDP expands 7 pct in Q2  • 1st LD-Writethru: China's H1 fixed-asset investment up 11.4 pct  • Commentary: Tougher work needs to be done to ensure Iran nuclear deal not half-baked  • Prisoners advised to meditate, play games as Australian prisons ban smoking  
You are here: 　 Home

New Horizon phones home, confirming successful Pluto flyby

Xinhua, July 15, 2015 Adjust font size:

New Horizons spacecraft has called home on Tuesday evening for the first time since its historic flyby of Pluto, confirming the first successful flyby of Pluto, NASA TV showed.

"We have confirmation of a successful Pluto Flyby," said the mission team on Twitter. Crowds gathered at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to listen for the "phone home" signal, which was sent from the probe 5 billion km away sweeping over Earth at around 9 p.m. EDT (0100 GMT).

"We are in lock step with the spacecraft based upon telemetry," mission operations manager Alice Bowman declared.

NASA's New Horizons performed the first-ever flyby of Pluto on Tuesday morning, at about 12,472 km (7,750 miles) above the surface, making the closest approach to the dwarf planet at 7:49 a.m. EDT (1149 GMT).

The unmanned, piano-sized probe, launched in 2006, has traveled more than 5.2 billion km to reach Pluto, from which radio signals, even if traveling at light speed, need 4.5 hours to get back to Earth. A small batch of images is expected to be released later.

However, the probe won't orbit or land on Pluto. Instead, it has kept flying, heading its journey deeper into the Kuiper Belt, a region that scientists think is filled with hundreds of small, icy objects.

Scientists believe that Kuiper Belt objects, such as Pluto, may prove the early formation of the solar system. Endi