As soon as NASA received confirmation that three billion miles away, the New Horizons probe survived its flyby past Pluto, the celebrations on Earth started in full force.
Just before 9 p.m. ET, mission operations manager Alice Bowman announced "we have a healthy spacecraft, we've recorded data of the Pluto system, and we're outbound from Pluto." The procedure went "just like we planned it, just like we practiced." Not only is the probe safe, but it will likely continue to transmit images of Pluto and its moons for several more months.
At Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, people cheered, clapped, and waved American flags. The confirmation came almost 13 hours after the spacecraft came within 7,750 miles of Pluto, and nearly five hours after after radio signals were sent out from the probe at the speed of light.
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