Solar system further opened to humans thanks to NASA's Pluto mission: Hawking
Professor Stephen Hawking, regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in history, has hailed the team behind NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto.
“I would like to congratulate the New Horizons team and NASA for their historic flyby of Pluto. The culmination of a decade-long mission, I can’t wait to see what new information the New Horizons spacecraft will reveal about our distant relative,” Hawking said in a video posted on his Facebook account on Tuesday.
“The revelations of New Horizons may help us to understand better how our solar system was formed. We explore because we are human, and we want to know. I hope that Pluto will help us on that journey. I will be watching closely, and I hope you will, too,” he further added.
Moving faster than any man-made spacecraft ever at a speed of about 30,800 miles per hour (50,000 kph), the nuclear-powered New Horizons managed to make its flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto at 1149 GMT on Tuesday, after a decade-long journey.
It takes about four and a half hours for signals to travel one-way between New Horizons and the Earth.
"The New Horizons spacecraft passes its closest approach mark at Pluto after a three billion mile (4.82 billion kilometers) journey," NASA said on Tuesday.
The United States President Barack Obama also congratulated the mission success on his Tweeter account on Tuesday.
The probe is carrying with it the ashes of the American astronomer Clyde William Tombaugh, who discovered the remote icy object in 1930.
New Horizons was launched in 2006 to study Pluto, its moons, particularly Charon, and one or two other Kuiper belt objects as it flies past them. It spent most of its nine-year journey to Pluto in hibernation only to wake up in January.
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