Spacecraft survives Pluto encounter

Information in its first call home following Tuesday's flyby recommend the shuttle encountered no miracles as it plunged past the frosty world at 14km/s,The sign got through a monster dish in Madrid, Spain - some piece of a Nasa system of interchanges antennas.The message took four hours and 25 minutes to navigate 4.7 billion km of space. The strain mounted as researchers and specialists at mission central command in Laurel, Maryland sat tight for telemetry data. So there was bliss and help when the sign was gotten at 01:53 BST; researchers and specialists cheered, embraced one another and waved American banners.

"We are in lock with telemetry from the spacecraft," said mission operations manager Alice Bowman as confirmation was received."We have a healthy spacecraft, we have recorded data from the Pluto system, and we are outbound from Pluto." A few minutes later, she added: "I can't express how I feel. It's just like we planned it!"Nasa's administrator Charles Bolden said: "With this mission, we have visited every single planet in the Solar System."The agency's science chief John Grunsfeld commented: "This is a tremendous moment in human history," adding: "The spacecraft is full of images and we can't wait."

Operations manager Alice Bowman confirmed that New Horizons' solid state recorder should be full of data. "The expected number of segments on that recorder had been used. That tells us that that data has been collected on the spacecraft," she explained.

The signal received on Wednesday morning contained only 

engineering data, and was designed to tell controllers whether the flyby sequence had been carried out properly. The first high-resolution pictures from the flyby should be downlinked later on Wednesday.Ralph Semmel, director of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where mission control is based, congratulated the mission team.

"What has Pluto given us? Whales, doughnuts, and a heart," he said, referring to informal names for surface features in images taken during the spacecraft's approach.

Team members had expressed confidence the flyby would go well, but there was a very small possibility that New Horizons could be lost as it sped through the Pluto system.

Any stray icy debris would have been lethal if it had collided with the spacecraft at its 14km/s velocity (31,000mph).

James Christy, who discovered Pluto's moon Charon, joined relatives of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the dwarf planet itself in 1930, at mission control to witness receipt of the signal.