Outbound from Pluto, New Horizons Calls Home

After an anxious day of waiting, the New Horizons spacecraft reconnected with Earth just before 9:00 PM EST as it sailed outbound from its close Pluto flyby. All systems are nominal and the fly-by, the first ever of Pluto, appears to have been a success. "One small step for New Horizons, one giant leap for mankind," Alan Stern, New Horizons' principle investigator, told tonight's press briefing.

Phew.

That's one thing about space: It doesn't feel rigged. Sports? Politics? C'mon. But space—space can go wrong. And it does. A lot.

Three rockets tasked with resupplying the International Space Station have been lost in less than a year's time. The Philae lander, the first craft to have ever made a "soft" landing on an asteroid, wound up initially unable to harvest the solar energy needed to operate. The landing was soft, but also dark. Meanwhile, almost a third of Martian missions over the past two decades have failed. My point is that space is hard: really, genuinely hard. When we overcome that, it's awesome. There's nothing else like it.

Tonight, we were waiting for a signal—a bit stream. After nine years of travel, the New Horizons spacecraft passed Pluto early Tuesday morning, breaking off communication with Earth as it turned its antennas toward the dwarf planet 12,500 km below. As the craft made its silent flyby, NASA engineers had all day to worry and wait for its scheduled reconnection. That came at 8:54 PM EST, just a few minutes ahead of schedule. A cheer went up at mission control and, one by one, the different engineering teams called in, reporting the ship's status:

"We've reported the expected amount of data."

"All hardware is healthy."

"Propulsion system is nominal."

"Nominal for power."

"All temperatures green."

And, finally: "We are outbound from Pluto."

It will be many months before the craft has transmitted all of its Pluto data back to Earth, but we can take an exhilarated breath knowing that it's on the way.