It's official: New Horizons has survived its close flyby of the Pluto system unscathed.
“We have a healthy spacecraft, we have a healthy system, and we are outbound for Pluto,” Alice Bowman, mission operations manager for New Horizons, said Tuesday night after the first group of ones and zeros arrived at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., which is managing the mission for NASA.
“It was just like we practiced,” she said.
The mission team had waited a long time for this moment.
“It's been 9 1/2 years, but this is the payday,” said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist.