"For me, it's a really exciting vindication that we can begin to explore our larger solar system."
Leslie Brown, Connecticut College Astronomer
On Tuesday night, astronomers got an encouraging signal from New Horizons -- after 21 hours of radio silence, the NASA probe reported it had safely made its way past Pluto. Now, scientists in Connecticut say the real work begins.
Michelle Collins is an astronomer at Yale University. On Tuesday she hosted a party for Pluto in New Haven, and said about 120 people showed up to celebrate the dwarf planet.
So far, Collins said she's loving the pictures New Horizons has sent back to Earth. "They've really blown my mind over the last few days," she said. "Back when I was a kid at school, Pluto was just this, like, weird dot. No one really knew what color it was. We just used to color it purple at school. Now we can see in all this incredible detail."
Collins said she has high hopes for the science that will come out of the New Horizons mission as it sends its data back to earth over the next 16 months.
She said we know some things, like the planet has a thin, tenuous atomosphere, which fluctuates based on the body's proximity to the sun (kind of like a comet). "And it's an icy surface and we think it has a rocky core," Collins said. "But there are some other things we suppose it may have. We think it may have underground oceans, similar to some of the other moons in the Solar System, so we're hoping to figure out if that's really true."
Leslie Brown, an astronomer at Connecticut College, said the mission is a technological and psychological victory. "For humans, it's a huge distance, for the universe, it's a teeny speck," she said. "So for me, it's a really exciting vindication that we can begin to explore our larger solar system."
"I have great hopes we can go much further," said Michelle Collins. " I mean it's only been 110 years since we figured out how to fly. And, already, we're at the edge of our Solar System. I think while it seems impossible that we can get any further -- we've done so much in such a short time that hopefully we can start going beyond the Solar System."
