LAUREL, Md. - NASA's New Horizon's space probe was pointed toward Pluto and the frozen, sunless reaches of the solar system on a nine-year journey after getting a gravity boost Wednesday from Jupiter. The fastest spacecraft ever launched was within a million and a half miles of Jupiter early Wednesday, giving scientists a close-up look at the giant gaseous planet and its moons.
Mission managers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. waited for the first signals from the spacecraft after it emerged from behind the giant planet.
Missions operations manager Alice Bowman ran through the status checklist, then cheers rang out when she declared: "The spacecraft is outbound from Jupiter and we're on our way to Pluto."
The probe, now accelerating to more than 52,000 mph, was designed and built at the lab in Laurel and tested at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. It will be making more than 700 separate science observations of the Jupiter system from January through June.
Project manager Glen Fountain said the craft will also travel through Jupiter's 'magneto tail,' which he described as a "tear drop-shaped bubble of plasma," streaming away from the planet into space.
"This is a region never before seen," Fountain said.
New Horizons began its 3 billion mile, 9 1/2-year journey to Pluto in January 2006, where it will study this unexplored dwarf planet and the mysterious icy area that surrounds it. When New Horizons took off, Pluto was a full-fledged planet, but astronomers downgraded it in August. The space probe's arrival there is expected in July 2015.
