NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is at Pluto. After a decade-long journey through our solar system, New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto on Tuesday. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft phoned home just before 9 p.m. EDT to tell the mission team and the world it had accomplished the historic first-ever flyby of Pluto. It is the first space mission to explore a world so far from Earth from such a short distance, about 7,750 miles above the surface (roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai, India). New Horizons’ flyby of the dwarf planet and its five known moons is providing an up-close introduction to the solar system's Kuiper Belt, an outer region populated by icy objects ranging in size from boulders to dwarf planets. Kuiper Belt objects, such as Pluto, preserve evidence about the early formation of the solar system. By the moment, New Horizons is collecting so much data that it will take 16 months to send it all back to Earth. A little bit more waiting for a 10 year's worth mission anyway.