The Pluto Fly By

Hey everybody! Put down your controllers, selfie sticks and grilled cheeses for a sec and get a dose of science in your life!

This morning at approximately 8 am, give or take several minutes, the New Horizons space craft reached Pluto and more specifically got as close as it was ever going to get during its fly by mission.

This is amazing news. This space craft was launched over 9 years ago and has since traveled over 3 billion miles to reach this destination. I mean, just try to wrap your head around that.

There will not be any communication with the space craft for the next 20 or so hours while it performs its scientific analysis of Pluto and tries to soak up as much data as it can. They estimate that the total amount of data could take around 16 months in total to be completely sent back to earth. It's going to be an amazing year for all the pluto nerds out there.

So far we have this image of Pluto taken earlier in the approach. Notice the cool heart shaped area on the surface? It's like Pluto is saying it still loves us even though we demoted it from planet status. On that note, Pluto actually ended up being larger than Nasa's initial estimates. I'm not sure what that will mean in terms of being promoted back to a planet but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Most of this entry has been the space nerd in me gushing. If you're looking for more precise information on the mission and their findings so far be sure to head over to the New Horizons page:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html

People are also celebrating the mission using #PlutoFlyBy on virtually all social media outlets, so be sure to include that when sharing your excitement today.

Thanks for reading!