LAUREL, Maryland -- American flags waved and people cheered as a baby grand piano-sized spacecraft flew by Pluto in an historic first. This completes humanity's 50-year long quest to explore the the planets and other large space objects in the solar system.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft made its closest pass of Pluto at 7:49 a.m. EDT Tuesday, taking the first-ever close-up observations of the dwarf planet.
While the craft was out of touch with Earth at that time -- busy doing science, with no time to phone home yet -- it didn't stop the 1,200 invited guests from celebrating here at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab.
Everyone gathered in a large meeting room to watch the countdown clock hit zero. People passed out American flags and even started a "U-S-A, U-S-A" chant as the countdown ended.
This mission makes the United States the first country to explore each planet from Mercury out to to Pluto.
"We do this because we explore," NASA's director of planetary science Jim Green said during the celebration. "We explore to survive. I truly believe we have to continue on exploring our solar system. We have to know what's out there."
A newly-released image of Pluto taken by New Horizons on July 13 shows a little bit of what's out there. The image represents the best view of Pluto taken by a craft in deep space.
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Pluto's heart-shaped patch and craters are coming into sharp relief for the first time, and the images collected during the close flyby -- which brought the craft about 7,750 miles from the dwarf planet's surface -- will blow even those out of the water, according to scientists working on the mission.
New Horizons sent its last signal to Earth at 11:17 p.m. EDT Monday, and it won't ping the planet again until a window of time starting at 8:53 p.m. EDT Tuesday, according to NASA.
During its silent time, New Horizons is expected to gather as much data using its seven instruments as it possibly can during and after its flyby. The craft should alert mission controllers of its health by tonight, letting them know how it fared during its long silence.
For now, everyone is settling in for the wait. The mission team sent the spacecraft on its way last night, and now, they just have to trust that the craft will do its job.
"There were a lot of us in the [mission operations center] even though we knew the spacecraft wouldn't be talking to us, but we were there. We wanted to be with it as it went through this journey," New Horizons mission operations manager Alice Bowman said during a news conference after the flyby time.
"I am feeling a little bit nervous just as you do when you send your child off, but i have absolute confidence that it's going to do what it needs to do to collect that science ... I guess it's a mix of feeling nervous and proud at the same time."