After a long day celebrating the arrival of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft at Pluto and wondering about its fate while it was out of radio contact, mission controllers finally received confirmation Tuesday night that the spacecraft had performed its scientific tasks. On schedule, at 8:52:37 p.m. Eastern time, a message from the spacecraft arrived at Mission Control here at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. “We are in lock with carrier,” said Alice Bowman, the missions operations manager. “Stand by for telemetry.” And a few moments later, when she confirmed that data was coming down, cheers erupted on Tuesday for the second time.
