It's official: New Horizons has successfully made it through 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, missions operations manager for the New Horizons mission, said just before 6 p.m. Pacific time Tuesday.
"It was just like we planned it," she said.
New Horizons' long journey to Pluto ended in an instant early Tuesday morning, when the NASA spacecraft went screaming past the dwarf planet at 30,800 mph -- but the mission is far from over.
Even as the spacecraft speeds deeper into the Kuiper belt, its instruments will continue to search for signs of faint rings around the small world and take measurements of the dust and plasma in Pluto's neighborhood.