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At just before 7:50 A.M. today, July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto. After a 9.5-year, three-billion-mile voyage, the ship got within about 7,750 miles from the surface. At 8:15 A.M., Alan Stern, principal investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, was joined by Alice Bowman, mission operations manager and John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, at a press conference at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.
