New Horizons begins Pluto flyby [Updated]

Science Focus

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New Horizons, after almost 10 years and 3 billion miles travelled, is all ready for its historic flyby of Pluto. If everything goes to plan, on Tuesday morning NASA's probe will pass within just 7,770 miles (12,500 kilometres) of Pluto's surface, finally completing humanity's reconnaissance of the classical nine planets.

As of Monday morning, New Horizons was about 1 million miles away from Pluto. As the probe nears the dwarf planet on Tuesday morning, it will go radio silent as it prepares for the money shot. At 12:49pm BST (7:49am EDT) on Tuesday, New Horizons will make its closest approach, buzzing by at 30,800mph (49,600km/h). New Horizons' myriad sensors and imagers will capture as much data as possible during this period, which will last a few hours. As long as nothing goes wrong, a radio link will be re-established at 1:53am BST on Wednesday morning—20:53 EDT Tuesday—and all of those delicious images will start to stream back to Earth.

NASA

Pluto from about two million miles away.

9 more images in gallery

The image above was captured on Saturday, from about 2 million miles away. Later on Monday, before the probe goes radio silent, it will send a full-frame 600-pixel-wide image of Pluto that should offer a lot more detail than the blurry images that we've seen so far. The images from the flyby itself, from a distance of just 12,500 kilometres, should be stunning.

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