Nine years on, Pluto is ready for its close-up

AFTER travelling three billion miles over the past nine years, the question ‘Are we there yet?’ seems fair enough.

And for the New Horizons craft, which will take the first close-up pictures of Pluto, the answer today will – finally – be yes.

The £451million space probe, travelling at 36,373mph, will fly past what used to be our most distant planet at 12.49pm. For since NASA launched the craft in 2006, Pluto – at just two-thirds the size of earth’s moon – has been downgraded to a dwarf planet.

The spacecraft will pass within 7,800 miles of Pluto – the first to ever make it to this part of the solar system.

Once New Horizons finally photographs Pluto, which was discovered in 1930, all of the planets in the solar system will have been pictured from close-up – a process which began with Venus in 1962.

However such is the distance that even transmitting the pictures back to Earth will take four hours. The photos will offer the first close-up look at Pluto’s surface, detailing features that are just 50 yards across. The mission’s principal scientist, Alan Stern, said: ‘We’re going to knock your socks off.’

Astronomer Brendan Owens, from the Greenwich Royal Observatory, London, said: ‘This is really unexplored territory. The images of Pluto we got previously have been only a few pixels across, just showing areas of light and dark on this world.

‘Now we’re getting up close and personal, something that has never been done before. This whole region is hard for astronomers to explore because we rely on light, and at that distance so little sunlight falls on these objects that you have very little data to work with.

‘Learning about the composition of Pluto may give us more of a handle on the make-up of the solar system.’

The nuclear powered probe has already taken pictures of Pluto from a million miles away, which reveal cliffs, craters and chasms larger than the Grand Canyon.

Another picture of the planet, which has an atmosphere of nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide, shows it as copper coloured with a bright spot in the shape of a heart. Scientists believe the dwarf planet may bear signs of past volcanic activity and could even have liquid water beneath its frozen surface.

The spacecraft will also take a look at Pluto’s giant moon Charon, which is just over half its size, as well as its other moons Styx, Nix, Hydra and Kerberos.

As well as a telescopic camera, the probe carries instruments for analysing Pluto’s composition and atmosphere. Some of the ashes of Pluto’s discoverer, US astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, are also on board. After Pluto, it is hoped New Horizons will target an asteroid in the Kuiper Belt, a region of space containing hundreds of thousands of objects.