Pluto-loving scientists are rejoicing.
Thanks to the New Horizons spacecraft, humanity just got its first truly close-up views of the dwarf planet Pluto Wednesday, and they are incredible. But before the rest of the world got to see the huge ice mountains of Pluto or the dark spot on its large moon Charon, the researchers responsible for capturing those pictures got a preview of the history-making images.
Boy, were they excited.
The newly-released close-up image of Pluto shows its mountains, craters and crags for the first time and puts a cap on a decades-long quest to send a probe to the dwarf planet and complete NASA's initial reconnaissance of every major body in the solar system. These photos are what they've been waiting for.
The newest photo of Pluto -- which revealed 11,000 foot cliffs on the dwarf world -- is a close up view captured when New Horizons zipped by Pluto in a close flyby on Tuesday. The piano-sized spacecraft passed about 7,750 miles from the surface of the dwarf planet before zipping out into the farther reaches of the Kuiper Belt, a mass of icy worlds circling the sun past the orbit of Neptune.