Depending on when you were born, Pluto is the 9th planet or the first “dwarf planet”. For all the discussion about how to classify Pluto however, we have yet to get a really good look at it. Depending on where it is in its orbit, Pluto is 2.66 billion to 4.67 billion miles from Earth. A search for images of Pluto will give you, primarily, artists renderings and computer simulations. Thanks to NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, that is about to change.

The piano sized spacecraft was the fastest ever when it was launched in January of 2006, the spacecraft awoke last month after a journey of three billion miles. On July 14 New Horizons will make the first ever close up flyby of the Pluto and return the first good images of our distant neighbor.

“NASA first mission to distant Pluto will also be humankind’s first close up view of this cold, unexplored world in our solar system. The New Horizons team worked very hard to prepare for this first phase, and they did it flawlessly,” said Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington in a statement.

New Horizons will begin gathering information with a long, range photo shoot on January 25. The images, captured by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) will provide a continuously improving look at Pluto’s moons. The information will also provide important navigational information as New Horizons continues to close the remaining 135 million miles to its target.

Over the next few months, hundreds of photos will be taken and used to double check estimates of the distance to Pluto and the location of its moons. Even at the relatively short distance between New Horizons and its target it will appear as little more than a series of bright dots until May. The New Horizons team will use data from LORRI to make corse corrections in preparation for the close up fly by.

“We need to refine our knowledge of where Pluto will be when New Horizons flies past it. The flyby timing also has to be exact, because the computer commands that will orient the spacecraft and point the science instruments are based on precisely knowing the time we pass Pluto – which these images will help us determine,” said Mark Holdridge, New Horizons encounter mission manager at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

As the spacecraft makes its first approach, additional instruments will gather additional data about Pluto’s environment. Measurements will be taken of high-energy particles from the sun in the Kuiper Belt as well as dust particle concentrations. Researchers believe that the outer region of our solar system could contain thousands of small frozen, rocky planets.

“We’ve completed the longest journey any spacecraft has flown from Earth to reach its primary target, and we are ready to begin exploring,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

After New Horizons flies by Pluto in July, it will continue on to investigate other Kuiper Belt objects (KNOs). According to the NASA website three potential targets have been identified to date.

The Kuiper Belt is a disc shaped region of our solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is believed that the region could contain 100,000 objects larger than 62 miles in diameter and an estimated trillion comets. The Oort cloud, beyond the Kuiper belt, may contain an additional trillion icy bodies.