Gadgetory

Pluto is unexplored no more I'm Bridget Carey this is your cnet update after nine years of soaring through three billion miles of our solar system NASA's new Horizons spacecraft zipped by Pluto Tuesday morning snapping photos and scanning the atmosphere becoming the first spacecraft to visit the distant dwarf planet and it's moon Charon history was made at 749 a.m. eastern time when New Horizons was closest to Pluto just about 8,000 miles from the surface celebrations were had at Mission Control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics lab in Maryland engineers cheered but really no one would know if the craft made it until it reestablishes contact later Tuesday night it flew by Pluto at a super-fast 31,000 miles per hour which is about 8 miles a second but getting data back to earth is a slow process with information traveling slower than dial up internet speeds and it will keep sending back data for the next 16 months we may not see more close-up images until another day or so this color photo is from Monday right before the flyby the images are a thousand times better than what was captured with the Hubble telescope and we're all feeling the love of Pluto with this latest image that reveals a heart-shaped feature on the planet some scientists believe it could be fresh deposits of frost others have referred to it as an eagle and some have visions of a different sort of Pluto over in New York City the American Museum of Natural History hosted a real-time visualization of what New Horizons was doing with commentary from Mission Control astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson director of the museum's Hayden Planetarium was one of the hosts of the event and as he explained in an interview after the event this mission was no easy task and compared it to threading a needle from New York to Los Angeles yeah this this is a triumph of engineering and the laws of physics Tyson was among those leading the change to downgrade Pluto from a planet to dwarf status in 2006 because it didn't behave the same as other planetary bodies but what's discovered on this won't change its status no matter what it finds it's still an icy body orbiting in the Kuiper belt and so our exhibit recut into metal need not change at all we'd like to put some updated images for sure but in terms of what how we are treating it the the nomenclature is not what led our efforts here this isn't the end of its 700 million dollar mission New Horizons continues to travel further into space into a region known as the Kuiper belt and along with the Pluto data it can provide us with clues to how the solar system was formed and so far we've already learned that Pluto is a little bit bigger than we expected that's it for this tech news update there's always more to explore at cnet com from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey