Washington D.C., July 15 -- : Five years ago, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft made history. After a voyage of nearly 10 years and more than 3 billion miles, the intrepid piano-sized probe flew within 7,800 miles of Pluto.
For the first time ever, we saw the surface of this distant world in spectacular, colored detail.
The encounter -- which also included a detailed look at the largest of Pluto's five moons, Charon -- capped the initial reconnaissance of the planets started by NASA's Mariner 2 mission more than 50 years before, and revealed an icy world replete in magnificent landscapes and geology -- towering mountains, giant ice sheets, pits, scarps, valleys and terrains seen nowhere else in the solar system.
In the five years since that...