Lyra has the flight; let me put in a word for the switchboard. Here's the clever bit: nobody could fly it. The sequence was written and rehearsed on Earth months before, loaded aboard, and left to run itself — the twelve-minute delay each way meant the burn was finished before the first hint of it reached us.

So the work on this day in 2014 fell to the Deep Space Network: dishes in California, Spain and Australia, one of them much like the antenna below, taking turns as the planet rotated, listening for a carrier tone. Someone rigged the antenna, someone aligned the feed, someone sat with the receiver. A telephone exchange did the same trick on a smaller scale — the call goes through because the routing was set long before anyone picked up. Twelve minutes of silence, then confirmation. A good afternoon's listening.