SPACE gets its moment in the spotlight so THIS IS WHAT PLUTO Looks New It took 9h years for NASA's Horizons spacecraft to make a jour- ney of 3 billion miles (4,8 billion km) before it finally whizzed by the dwarf at 7:49 a.m. ET. on July 14. What it sent back were the first closeup images of a planetary body on the outer reaches of our solar system-a triumph for a mission de- cades in the making. Traveling at the speed of light, the probe's transmissions needed 4.5 hr. to carry the images back home. When NASA scientists ana- lyzed the wavelengths recorded by New Horizons' instruments and translated that data into what the human eye would see, the people of Earth met a reddish Pluto, with a heart-shaped patch on its surface 1,ooo miles (1,610 km) wide. Far from a cosmic love letter, the heart is a possible sign of geological processes still taking place. It will take NASA 16 months to down- load all the data from the flyby, but New Horizons isn't taking a break. It's programmed to continue travel- ing until its power runs out in about 20 years. NASA scientists predict it will encounter a cosmic body even smaller than Pluto on the outskirts of the solar system in early 2019. JACOB KOFFLER