The world's fascination with space reached a new high last week when images from Pluto revealed mountains as tall as the Rockies - and the absence of craters.
The race for space has long ebbed and flowed as, first, the great powers kept trying to ''out discover'' the other, then emerging economies started to spend billions on sending probes into space. Television series about space travel continue to enthral audiences around the world.
So too the pictures from Pluto, even downgraded as it has been to a small planet, provided uplifting news at a time when economic woes, war and famine dominates much policy making around the world.
Until a few weeks ago, Pluto was a blurry dot. But within a few days, it was transformed into a dynamic world with varied geography, pointing to the possibility of ice volcanoes and churning tectonics.
This was no easy journey for New Horizons, which lifted off in January 2006. It arrived 72 seconds early - yes correct, a mere 72 seconds ahead of schedule - some nine years later.
Last week's ''fly by'', when the spacecraft buzzed within 12,500km of the former ninth planet, came 50 years to the day after Nasa's Mariner 4 space ship made a similar pass of Mars.
When New Horizons sent back the first batch of its bountiful trove of data, there was something close to bedlam experienced, according to the mission's principal investigator Alan Stern.
A day before, Nasa had released a mesmerising image of the full disc of Pluto (published at left), highlighted by a bright heart shaped swath of terrain.
The new image focused on a much smaller patch, about 241km across, near the bottom of the heart shape. The first surprise was the rugged topography - high mountains almost certainly made of frozen water, rather than rock.
That was a surprise because observations of Pluto from Earth had not found any signs of ice water. Frozen nitrogen and methane had been detected, but those ices are too weak to be bent and lifted into mountains.
Scientists are now in no doubt they will find water in great abundance as New Horizons streams data back over the next 18 months.
But more than just capturing a close up of Pluto, the mission is providing an opportunity to explore a new neighbourhood of the solar system that is bigger and stranger than the solar system that astronomers thought they had catalogued even as recently as the 1990s.
There is a push in New Zealand, and in other countries, to encourage children to follow careers in science by interesting them now in mysteries awaiting discovery.
If nothing else, Pluto will excite huge numbers of pupils and students into following the discoveries as they are unveiled. And the fascination of space will continue beyond Pluto.
New Horizons is now speeding into the Kuiper belt, which extends a couple of billion kilometres beyond Pluto and likely contains billions of icy worlds.
Kuiper belt objects are seemingly remnants of the earliest building blocks of the solar system, too far apart and too sparse to coalesce to a planet, but these small worlds are not as bland as once thought.
Mission scientists hope the New Horizons project is far from finished, and that Nasa will grant it an extension to take a look at one of two small Kuiper belt objects close to its trajectory.
A decision on the next destination is expected in August, and if approved the spacecraft's course will be adjusted. With interest so high, and the potential to learn much more about new worlds, a decision to extend the mission will be welcomed worldwide.
