IN SPACE, of course, it's all relat

IN SPACE, of course, it's all relative. A distance of 12,500km (7,750 miles) is a close flyby, when the target is the better part of 5 billion km away. July 14th was a date that enthusiasts of planets (or, as it turned out, dwarf planets) had awaited for nearly nine and a half years: the New Horizons space probe whizzed by Pluto at a speed of about 14km per second (31,000 mph).

Even before it did to Pluto what maverick pilots do to control towers, data from the craft were shedding new light on the dwarf planet (the image above was taken on July 13th). Those data finally settle the question of Pluto's precise size (2,370 km across, about two-thirds the size of the Earth's moon), and suggest that it is made up of more ice than was previously thought.
When New Horizons set off, in January 2006, what was known about Pluto "could fit on a postcard", according to one NASA scientist. Pluto was still a planet, with three moons. Amid impassioned debate, it got demoted to a dwarf planet later in the year (read why). Two new moons, Kerberos and Styx, were spotted by the Hubble telescope in 2011 and 2012, bringing the total to five. The close look afforded in July, as New Horizons nipped straight through the plane defined by these satellites' orbits, might even throw up more.