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Astronauts may one day melt some of that ice to get rocket fuel for perhaps a return journey. >> interesting you think there's radioactive material there. >> well, why is the earth active gee logically? it's because the center of the orth is radioactive. that's what causes the center of the earth to churn and we have continental drift. pluto is radioactive in the center, about you we don't know for sure. >> nine and a half years to get there. what's the next ten years look like on research on this? >> well, the next ten years is going to go sailing into the kiper belt and there's another objec...

First-ever close-up. >> i don't think any one of us could have imagined that it was this good of a toy store. [ laughter ] >> this is what we came for. [ laughter ] >> this exceeds what we came for. >> pluto is so far away a radio signal takes about nine hours to get there and back. from pluto, the sun appears to be a tiny star lost in the milky way. the craft was launched in 2006 costed $723 million. it's traveled a staggering 3 billion miles in nine and a half years. with this achievement, the united states is now the first country to reach all the planets within our solar system. professor ...

Temperature, about storms, weather. is there anything like that? would we learn from this mission those kinds of things? >> pluto does not have weather as we know it. however, it does have some kind of atmospheric activity. so we're tantalized by the fact that it violates the usual rules of planetary evolution. we now believe that pluto may be radioactive. that may be the source of energy that drives the resurfacing of the planet. maybe we'll see geysers just like on some of the moons of jupiter. >> all right, everybody wants to know. life, is there a possibility there could be life on pluto? ...

Killing the dinosaurs. remember, the dinosaurs did not have a space program, they had no way to deflect that comet. we do. and pluto is the largest object in the belt of comets. >> did you ever think you'd see this in your career in your lifetime? >> no. when i was a kid, i thought in my lifetime i would never see pictures if three billion miles into outer space, but there they are, in living color, detailed photographs of the surface showing that it's young, and been resurfaced a few hundred million years ago. >> so the text books are going to have to be rewritten, i as opposed to. >> that's ...

>> an awful lot. this is the space spectacular of the decade. we thought pluto would be a dead planet like the moon. we don't see craters, look at that. we don't see craters on pluto. parts are as smooth as a baby's bottom. how can that be unless the surface was resurfaced a few million years ago? we believe pluto was gee logically active and that upsets all our understanding of these objects. they're not frozen solid at all. they'll probably have geysers, volcanoes and they're gee logically active. >> how much can we learn from these pictures and what is the next step? we found out a lot abou...