IN SPACE, of course, it's all relative. A distance of 12,500km (7,750 miles) is a close flyby, when the target is the better part of 5 billion km away. July 14th was a date that enthusiasts of planets (or, as it turned out, dwarf planets) had awaited for nearly nine and a half years: the New Horizons space probe whizzed by Pluto at a speed of about 14km per second (31,000 mph).

Even before it did to Pluto what maverick pilots do to control towers, data from the craft were shedding new light on the dwarf planet (the image above was taken on July 13th). Those data finally settle the question of Pluto's precise size (2,370 km across, about two-thirds the size of the Earth's moon), and suggest that it is made up of more ice than was previously thought.

When New Horizons set off, in January 2006, what was known about Pluto "could fit on a postcard", according to one NASA scientist. Pluto was still a planet, with three moons. Amid impassioned debate, it got demoted to a dwarf planet later in the year (read why). Two new moons, Kerberos and Styx, were spotted by the Hubble telescope in 2011 and 2012, bringing the total to five. The close look afforded in July, as New Horizons nipped straight through the plane defined by these satellites' orbits, might even throw up more.

What lies beyond will surely continue to make headlines, too. Since brakes are hard to come by in space, New Horizons will zoom onward and outward into the Kuiper belt, the vast torus of rocky detritus beyond the planets; it will send news from there starting in 2019. That should give space-exploration trophy-collectors quite a few more objects to consider, as we wrote in 2006; it is already known that the belt is home to larger bodies than Pluto.

For now, though, the trophy-collectors have completed a set: all of the bodies of the solar system that were at least once considered planets have now been visited. New Horizons is one of only two missions since the Voyager pair of probes in the 1970s to set off toward bodies not yet visited, and there is little of similar scope to follow. As we observed in April, other outer-planet missions will run out of steam in the coming years, and lots of cash has been diverted in an attempt to restore manned spaceflight to its former glories.

The "Year of the dwarf", as we dubbed it in The World In 2015, has thus reached its apotheosis—at 11:49 GMT, to be precise, though it will take some time for the snapshots of the event to arrive back at Earth. It is, as this week's story has it, the finale of the Heroic Age of space exploration.