Pluto goes under the spectroscope
Nina Notman probes the mission that is boldly going where no spacecraft has gone before
In January 2006, the NASA New Horizons spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Its mission: to explore the outer reaches of our solar system. This summer, almost 10 years later, it carried out the first ever flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto and its moons.
The unmanned spacecraft is now hurtling deeper into space, while sending the data its seven onboard analytical instruments collected during the couple of months it spent near Pluto. This data transfer will take around 16 months, but scientists are busily interpreting the information that has already travelled the three billion miles back to Earth.
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