New Horizons to be snapped as NASA craft starts beaming Pluto pics

Nine years after leaving Earth, the New Horizons spacecraft is at last drawing close to Pluto and is expected to start shooting photographs of the dwarf planet. The first mission to Pluto began in January 2006 when an Atlas V rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida and hauled the piano-sized New Horizons craft away from Earth and on a three-billion mile journey. The spacecraft’s long-range reconnaissance imager will take hundreds of pictures over the coming months.

We can’t wait to turn Pluto into a real world, instead of just a little pixelated blob.

Project scientist Hal Weaver, from Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory

The first are expected to be beamed back to Earth tomorrow from a distance of around 100 million miles. Its trip to the solar system’s outer frontier is the longest any spacecraft has made from Earth. After New Horizons finishes its six-month investigation of Pluto, it will pass near other objects in the Kuiper Belt, a vast ring of debris left over from the solar system’s birth some 4.6 billion years ago.

We have been working on this project, some people, for over a quarter of their careers. And now we’re about to hit the mother lode.

Project manager Glen Fountain, from the Applied Physics Lab

Science Pluto