Closest Spacecraft to Approach Pluto

On July 14, 2015, the spacecraft New Horizons will come within 7,767 miles of (former planet) Pluto. The probe has been traveling for six years already, covering a million kilometers every day, and broke a record on Friday by becoming the closet spacecraft to Pluto ever. The previous record was 1.58 billion kilometers, when Voyager I came its closest to Pluto in 1986.

“We’ve come a long way across the solar system,” says Glen Fountain, New Horizons project manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “When we launched [on Jan. 19, 2006] it seemed like our 10-year journey would take forever, but those years have been passing us quickly. We’re almost six years in flight, and it’s just about three years until our encounter begins.”

From New Horizons’ current distance to Pluto – about as far as Earth is from Saturn – Pluto remains just a faint point of light. But by the time New Horizons sails through the Pluto system in mid-2015, the planet and its moons will be so close that the spacecraft’s cameras will spot features as small as a football field.

Get ready for your closeups, Pluto! Link