Spacecraft phones home as it flies past Pluto

People still peeved that Pluto’s not a planet may take some solace.

A 91/2-year mission by NASA that sent New Horizons, a spacecraft the size of a grand piano, to Pluto demonstrated Tuesday that the dwarf planet is bigger than astronomers had thought: 1,473 miles in diameter.

Millions watched live Tuesday night as scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., exclaimed that the spacecraft had handled the long journey well and that data would ensue.

After re-establishing contact Tuesday night, it will take 16 months for it to send 10 years’ worth of data back to Earth, according to NASA’s website.

Pluto was the ninth planet in our solar system until it was reclassified in 2006 as a dwarf planet, said Ken Ruffin, president of the National Space Society of North Texas.

The New Horizons probe, moving at 31,000 mph, got within 7,750 miles of the freezing planetoid at 6:49 a.m. CDT, Ruffin said — the first-ever flyby of Pluto.

Ruffin spoke Tuesday afternoon at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History’s Noble Planetarium about why Pluto is important.

Here are some interesting facts:

▪ Pluto was named by a little girl after Roman mythology’s Pluto, the god of the underworld. The girl’s father was friends with Clyde Tombaugh, the young man just out of college who discovered Pluto in 1930 by using photographic plates.

▪ Some of Tombaugh’s ashes are in a container on New Horizons and went by Pluto on Tuesday morning.

▪ Pluto is about 4 billion miles from the sun and is almost minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

▪ When New Horizons was launched on Jan. 19, 2006, it was the fastest human-made object in space. At the time, Pluto was still considered a planet. New Horizons remains the fastest spacecraft ever launched.

▪ Pluto has five moons and different-colored regions that look like a heart. New Horizons mapped Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, which is slightly larger than Texas.

▪ Pluto and Charon are the same distance apart as Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.

▪ Before Tuesday’s photographs, the best photo we had of Pluto was taken by the Hubble space telescope in 1994.

It will take NASA about two years to decipher the data sent from New Horizons, Ruffin said.

“This is huge,” he said. “We will have enough information to fill a set of old-school encyclopedias.”

This story was originally published July 14, 2015 at 9:04 PM with the headline "Spacecraft phones home as it flies past Pluto."