Video: The New Horizons team hold news conference after flyby declared a success

The final flight of a Delta 2 rocket, a mainstay of the U.S. launch industry for nearly 30 years, began at 6:02 a.m. PDT (9:02 a.m. EDT; 1302 GMT) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with NASA’s ICESat 2 Earth science satellite.

NASA has added extra safeguards to the agency’s standard pre-launch quarantine protocol to protect astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley from the coronavirus and other contagions in the final two weeks before their scheduled May 27 launch on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.

Geologists said Thursday they are bewildered by images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft baring unseen landscapes on Pluto with unexpected “snakeskin” textures, colorful chasms routing through ancient landforms, and vivid new views of apparent glacial flows.