Another historic achievement in man's exploration of the space. A NASA spacecraft had a dramatic rendezvous with Pluto, the last unexplored world in the solar system - an encounter marked here in New York. NY1's Roger Clark has the story.

At Mission Control for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, cheers erupted Tuesday when the probe passed by Pluto, a staggering 3,000,000,000 miles from earth.

At the same moment here in New York, guests at the American Museum of Natural History were able to imagine what was happening through computer visualization.

"What you are seeing is actual navigation plotting information. Down to the second accuracy, below second accuracy," said Director of Astrovisualization Carter Emmart.

Emmart and experts like planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson gave a play by play as animation showed the probe passing within 7,700 miles of the dwarf planet at 7:50 a.m., nine years after its journey began.

"This is a triumph of engineering and the laws of physics," Director of Hayden Planetarium Neil deGrasse Tyson said.

New Horizons has already zapped back a series of increasingly spectacular images as it approached Pluto.

The real good stuff from Tuesday's flyby is expected to arrive Wednesday and then four months after that, hopefully answering a series of questions about what was once considered the ninth planet in the solar system before receiving a bit of a demotion from scientists.

"What's the atmosphere of Pluto actually made out of? How far does it extend? What temperatures? All of these things will be answered by this spacecraft’s instruments," said Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences Chair Denton Ebel.

It was quite a morning for scientists and those on hand to see the real time animated version.

"I'm going to be following what's happening on Pluto and hopefully more information will come to us via what happened today," said one woman.

"I'm a teacher so definitely I will bring this back to my students,” another woman said.

New Horizons certainly is not done with its mission yet. It will continue to gather data from the edge of the solar system, providing information for scientists to study, for years to come.