The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) “New Horizons” space probe completed its nine-year mission, passing Pluto on July 14 and taking a number of high quality pictures, which are currently being received and interpreted.

Knowledge of Pluto’s existence is relatively recent — the dwarf planet was discovered in 1930 by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. In contrast, Neptune was discovered in 1846.

While we often marvel at the difficulty involved in sending a man to the moon, the mathematical precision behind completing the Pluto launch is on a whole other level.

“We’ve never attempted anything that intricate,” Astronomy club President Arun Shriram (12) said. “What is amazing is that we had to send the spacecraft to a ‘keyhole’ [target destination] which was just 60 by 90 miles. It managed to pass through Pluto and five of its moons in such a small space in just nine years.”

To put this into perspective, Pluto is, on average, 39.5 astronomical units (AU) away from the sun, where 1 AU is the average distance between the sun and Earth. This means that New Horizons travelled 5.76 billion kilometers aiming for a box smaller than the municipal boundaries of Beijing — and made it.

Proportionately, if New Horizons were a baseball and Earth were a pitcher, he or she would be aiming for a strike zone 13,000 miles away (if the strike zone is approximated as 18×18 in). He would also have to throw quite a curveball — that’s a little over half the Earth’s circumference.

So what was of such astronomical importance that NASA was willing to attempt a precision shot?

Before New Horizons, all pictures of Pluto had been taken from a great distance, making results blurry and indecipherable. This gif by NASA shows the improvement in the quality of images of Pluto over the years.

“The highest resolution image [of Pluto] that existed before New Horizons has Pluto at 12 pixels across,” Astronomy teacher Dr. Mark Brada said. “Literally it was just a blip on the screen. Now we have these incredible high resolution images.”

But once researchers began receiving New Horizon’s images, they saw something unexpected about Pluto’s surface.

“The expectation was that [Pluto]’d look like Mercury or the Moon — icy, pretty much a dead world, covered with pockmarks — it would have what’s referred to as an ‘old surface,” former Astronomy teacher and current Physics teacher Dr. Eric Nelson said.

But Pluto was not like Mercury, still and dead.

“[Pluto] has a new surface, meaning it’s geologically active,” Dr. Nelson said. “Why is this dwarf planet, that far from the sun [that] it’s about three or four degrees above absolute zero, active? Where’s the energy coming from?”

Pluto’s unexpected traits have baffled astronomers. Many theories about planetary formation have been contradicted.

“[New Horizon]’s going to give us better estimations of [Pluto]’s composition, which is very important because then we’ll know what the outer reaches of the solar system are made of,” Elina Sendonaris (12) said. “That in turn will change our formation theory of planetary systems, which is flawed. With all this new data from Pluto, we can revise our theories so that it can fit all the data we’ve collected so far.”

Although New Horizons has already surprised researchers, it plans to take pictures of Pluto’s five satellites, and some of its data signals are still in transit.

“It may take about 12 or 13 more months for all the info to come back to us,” Arun said. “New Horizons will keep going past Pluto. Who knows what else it will send us?”