LOS ANGELES, July 14 -- New Horizons spacecraft has called home on Tuesday evening for the first time since its historic flyby of Pluto, confirming the first successful flyby of Pluto, NASA TV showed.

"We have confirmation of a successful Pluto Flyby," said the mission team on Twitter. Crowds gathered at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to listen for the "phone home" signal, which was sent from the probe 5 billion km away sweeping over Earth at around 9 p.m. EDT (0100 GMT).

"We are in lock step with the spacecraft based upon telemetry," mission operations manager Alice Bowman declared.

NASA's New Horizons performed the first-ever flyby of Pluto on Tuesday morning, at about 12,472 km (7,750 miles) above the surface, making the closest approach to the dwarf planet at 7:49 a.m. EDT (1149 GMT).

The unmanned, piano-sized probe, launched in 2006, has traveled more than 5.2 billion km to reach Pluto, from which radio signals, even if traveling at light speed, need 4.5 hours to get back to Earth. A small batch of images is expected to be released later.

However, the probe won't orbit or land on Pluto. Instead, it has kept flying, heading its journey deeper into the Kuiper Belt, a region that scientists think is filled with hundreds of small, icy objects.

Scientists believe that Kuiper Belt objects, such as Pluto, may prove the early formation of the solar system.