Stephen Hawking Congratulates the New Horizons Team on the Successful Pluto Fly-By

It's not every single day that we send a spacecraft all the way to Pluto, which is more than 3 billion miles away from Earth in our solar system; in fact, it has only been done once in the history of mankind (just this week).

Stephen Hawking is shown in this video congratulating the New Horizons team on their nearly 9.5-year achievement in the making. Although it was a long time to wait, New Horizons only flew past Pluto for a mere 15 minutes to snap some decent photos.

Thanks to the fly-by, we now know what Pluto actually looks like. For the longest time, Pluto has been nothing but a blurry gray blip on a screen, but now high quality photos actually show us features of the dwarf planet, and its moons.

Travelling at more than 30,000 miles per hour, the spacecraft continues to fly out into interstellar space, where it will eventually find even more new territories.

High quality photographs of Pluto will take a while to transmit to Earth, so we'll have to be patient. Some of the largest resolution photos are expected some time in September. With how far away from Earth the spacecraft is, it's understandable that it takes so long to transmit data.