Humanity is about to get its first close-up and high-resolution view of Pluto, as NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is nearing its rendezvous with the distant dwarf planet.
Launched in January 2006, the space probe is set to start taking pictures of the tiny world, just two-thirds the size of our moon, in preparation for a close fly-by in July that will see the spacecraft pass just 7,700 miles from Pluto's surface.
Those pictures, taken as New Horizons has reached a distance from Earth of 3 billion miles, will be the best ever taken of the dwarf world, much better than the hazy, pixelated views that Hubble Space Telescope managed to capture more than 10 years ago.
The spacecraft will be traveling fast -- around 8 miles per second --when it arrives as Pluto, much too fast to go into orbit around it, but scientists will eagerly await the data and images it can capture in its brief fly-by.
"Our knowledge of Pluto is quite meager," says planetary scientist Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator. "It is very much like our knowledge of Mars was before our first mission there 50 years ago."
While the first pictures sent back from New Horizons may not reveal much detail -- the spacecraft is still more that 100 million miles from Pluto -- they will help the spacecraft's controllers fine tune and align its path for its meeting with the dwarf world.
The first of any needed course corrections would probably be made in March, they say.
Patiently waiting during the nine years of the spacecraft's journey through the solar system -- much of that spent in a "hibernation" mode from which it was awakened last month -- mission scientists are now gearing up for what promises to be a busy few months.
"It's going to be a sprint for the next seven months, basically, to the finish line," says project scientist Hal Weaver of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. "We can't wait to turn Pluto into a real world, instead of just a little pixelated blob."
When New Horizons reached Pluto, it will complete humanity's goal to visit -- at least by proxy -- all of the solar system's planets, historically nine in number but now eight plus Pluto, "demoted" to the status of dwarf planet in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union following the discovery that Pluto is only one of many large icy bodies in the outer solar system.
One of those objects, Eris, is even larger that Pluto, leading the IAU to create the category for "dwarf planets."
Still, whether planet or dwarf, Pluto has fascinated us since its discovery in 1930, and soon we'll be getting a much better look at this denizen of the distant solar system.
