Spacecraft New Horizons Preps To Make a Move on Pluto

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is finally approaching Pluto after a nine year trip, and like after a fated pair make eye-contact across a room, the craft is prepping itself to move in for some historic face-time.

"NASA's first mission to distant Pluto will also be humankind's first close up view of this cold, unexplored world in our solar system," the director of NASA's Planetary Science Division recently explained in a statement.

"The New Horizons team worked very hard to prepare for this first phase," he added, "and they did it flawlessly."

When the piano-sized New Horizons launched back in January 2006, it was the fastest spacecraft ever made. It certainly had to be, considering that Pluto lies 4.67 billion miles (7.5 billion km) from Earth - as the crow flies. The distance that New Horizons had to travel was even further, considering that the planetoid's orbit is almost on the complete opposite side of the Sun from where Earth is. Talk about a long drive for a first date!

You can watch a stunning video of the craft's journey through space below.

Early last month, after traveling more than three billion miles in a hibernation state - when New Horizons did not expend any energy, and let the gravity of planets and moons whip it where it needed to go - the spacecraft finally woke up.

Since then, the mission team has been letting the craft "freshen itself up," so to speak, and prepare for a voyeur-esk long-range photo shoot that will begin next week.

The images captured by New Horizons' telescopic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) will give mission scientists a continually improving look at the dynamics of Pluto's mysterious moons and will also play a critical role in navigating the spacecraft over the 135 million miles it still has to cover.

The true scientific mission, when New Horizons will swing in close to the icy planetoid, is expected to begin this spring. Then, the spacecraft's many instruments will whirr to life to gather intimately detailed data and high definition photos of the mysterious "demoted planet" of our solar system for the first time ever.

[Credit: NASA/JHUAPL]