A fly-by of a comet went off flawlessly Thursday morning, giving giddy scientists only their fifth close-up look at the nucleus of a comet.

NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft passed within 435 miles of Comet Hartley 2 about 10 a.m. Eastern time. Soon after, it turned its high-speed antenna toward Earth to beam back the photos it had taken.

People at mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., cheered when the signal from the spacecraft came in and cheered again as the pictures popped up on their computer screens.

The first ones, taken hours earlier while the spacecraft was tens of thousands of miles from Hartley 2, showed a small white dot.