New Horizons called and said “Made it!”
After a long day celebrating the arrival of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft at Pluto and wondering about its fate while it was out of radio contact, mission controllers finally received confirmation Tuesday night that the spacecraft had performed its scientific tasks.
On schedule, at 8:52:37 p.m. Eastern time, a message from the spacecraft arrived at Mission Control here at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
“We are in lock with carrier,” said Alice Bowman, the missions operations manager. “Stand by for telemetry.”
And a few moments later, when she confirmed that data was coming down, cheers erupted on Tuesday for the second time.
Yay!
A long time ago, I attended and graduated from NMSU, Las Cruces, New Mexico. I had the distinct pleasure of taking an Astronomy course from Dr. Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto. He would be happy to see this day.