AKIPRESS.COM - Scientists are receiving data that will offer the closest look ever of Pluto later Wednesday, after the unmanned NASA spacecraft whizzed by the distant dwarf planet, Phys.org reports.

After a 4.8-billion-kilometer journey that took nearly 10 years, the nuclear-powered New Horizons – about the size of a baby grand piano – snapped pictures of Pluto as it hurtled by on auto-pilot.

The photos will reveal details of Pluto never seen before in the history of space travel. The images are to be released by the U.S. space agency on Wednesday, once they are downlinked from New Horizons.

"Sending back 'first-look' data to the team 'down under'," the New Horizons team tweeted Wednesday morning, indicating its space antenna in Canberra, Australia was receiving information from the craft.

New Horizons is moving faster than any spacecraft ever built, at a speed of about 30,800 miles per hour.

Some 13 hours after the flyby, applause broke out in mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Center outside the U.S. capital Washington, as the spacecraft made its "phone-home" contact with Earth and all systems were reported to be intact.

"We have a healthy spacecraft," said mission operations manager Alice Bowman. "We are outbound from Pluto."

The confirmation eased anxiety among scientists who were waiting all day to find out if the $700 million New Horizons survived the chaotic Kuiper Belt, the region beyond Neptune that Stern has described as a "shooting gallery" of cosmic debris.

NASA had said there was a one in 10,000 chance that the spacecraft could be lost, and all it would take would be "a collision with a particle as small as a grain of rice."

The spacecraft passed 7,750 miles – or about the distance from New York to Mumbai, India – from Pluto's surface at 1149 GMT.

The spacecraft launched in 2006, the same year that Pluto was downgraded to "dwarf planet" status due to the celestial body's small size.

New Horizons is the first spacecraft to fly past Pluto and its seven scientific instruments aim to reveal up-close details of the surface, geology and atmosphere of Pluto and its five moons.

Already, scientists have learned from New Horizons that Pluto is 12-18 miles larger than previously thought, with a radius of 736 miles.

Scientists have also confirmed the existence of a polar ice cap on Pluto and found nitrogen escaping from Pluto's atmosphere.

NASA image received July 14, 2015 shows an image of Pluto and Charon presented in false colors obtained by the Ralph instrument on New Horizons spacecraft