Author: Associated Press / Source: LEX18.com
LAUREL, Md. (AP) — NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has survived humanity’s most distant exploration of another world.
Ten hours after the middle-of-the-night encounter 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away, flight controllers in Laurel, Maryland, received word from the spacecraft late Tuesday morning. Cheers erupted at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, home to Mission Control.
“We have a healthy spacecraft. We’ve just accomplilshed the most distant flyby,” announced Alice Bowman, mission operations manager.
An anxious spill-over crowd in a nearby auditorium joined in the loud celebration, cheering each green, or good, status update. When the spacecraft was finally declared healthy and the flyby successful, scientists and other team members embraced, while hundreds of others gave a standing ovation.
“It’s a great day. Happy New Year!” said Mark Holdridge, a mission manager from Johns Hopkins.
New Horizons zoomed past the small…
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