It took nearly 10 years for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft to arrive at Pluto, but the momentous occasion finally happened on Tuesday.

The spacecraft, weighing just over 1,000 pounds, traveled 3 billion miles to reach the dwarf planet, reports the Los Angeles Times. Its closest approach was on Tuesday when it passed roughly 7,750 miles above the planet's surface -- about the same distance from New York to Mumbai, India.

New Horizons had to be sent at high speeds to the Kuiper belt, which is a region of the solar system beyond the planets. It flew by Pluto and its five moons at 30,800 mph -- unable to orbit or linger.

On Earth, the New Horizons team sat in the operations room waiting for the craft to complete the arduous journey.

Pluto is two-thirds the size of our planet's moon. Its gravity is weak. New Horizons had no chance of being pulled in an orbit unless it was moving slower or close to Pluto's velocity.

While the spacecraft did not orbit, it got close enough to reveal exciting new facts about the distant planet.

Scientists have discovered Pluto is bigger than first estimated. Previously, the planet was believed to be between 715 and 746 miles across, but new findings give Pluto a radius of roughly 736 miles across.

Pluto's interior is also less dense than previously thought, and it has more ice and less rock, New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said.

It appears there is snow on Pluto, Stern said at a news conference on Tuesday. Images collected by New Horizons show Pluto's icy polar cap, which is thought to be composed of nitrogen ice and methane ice.

The images also show mysterious dark poles on Pluto's moon, Charon. The dark poles are something never before seen in our solar system.

"The system is enchanting in its strangeness and alien beauty, showing us complex and nuanced surfaces that are beyond our wildest dreams of science," Stern said.

The spacecraft, which left Earth on the Pluto mission in 2006, is scheduled to communicate the scientific data it has collected on Tuesday evening.

More images are expected to be released Thursday or Friday.

The New Horizons mission is managed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, which designed and operates the spacecraft. The mission cost $700 million.