DHAKA: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will fly past Pluto for an up-close-and-personal photo shoot on July 14 after traveling three billion miles.

We've never seen Pluto up close. Until recently, the best photos ever taken showed it as a small dot. But on July 14, NASA's New Horizons probe is going to fly within 7,750 miles of Pluto — and show us the beloved dwarf planet and its five moons for the first time, reports vox.com

If everything goes to plan, it will be a staggering technological accomplishment. Pluto is the farthest destination for any space mission in history. It took New Horizons nine years to cover the 3 billion mile trip there — which means it's currently using decade-old technology, traveling a route that was calculated years ago. And because New Horizons is traveling at such a high speed (about 31,000 miles per hour) and can't slow down, the flyby will be over in a matter of minutes.

"It's a bit like putting a GoPro on a speeding bullet"

It's not inaccurate to say that this mission is a bit like putting a GoPro on a speeding bullet and shooting it at a spot in the sky, with the knowledge that Pluto would be waiting there years later for a photo shoot.

But more than its technological prowess and amazing photos, New Horizons' brief moment with Pluto will mark a historic moment in space exploration. For the first time in a generation — since the Voyager 2 probe swooped by Neptune in 1989 — we're going to see an entirely new world for the first time. But it'll also be the last time. As Dennis Overbye puts in an excellent New York Times column, "None of us alive today will see a new planet up close for the first time again."

We're about to see Pluto for the first time

Lots of people assume we've seen Pluto before, but they're likely thinking of artists' renderings or illustrations. Until very recently, the best photos we had of the dwarf planet looked like this:

But that's quickly changing. Over the past few weeks, as New Horizons has closed in on Pluto, it's given us better and better photos — including this one, taken on July 7, from 5 million miles away:

Pluto, as photographed by New Horizons on July 7, from 5 million miles away.

It's a big improvement, but it's nothing compared to what New Horizons will capture at its closest approach. "We’re going to turn points of light into a planet and a system of moons before your eyes," Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator, said in April.

We won't receive the best photos during the flyby itself — because the spacecraft will be too busy taking them to transmit data back to Earth. But starting July 16, we'll get beautiful, high-resolution maps of Pluto's surface that reveal all sorts of geologic features.

BDST: 0927 HRS, JULY 12, 2015
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