Fastest spacecraft ever making historic planet flyby Tuesday | Weather

Size matters, even for dwarf planets. Pluto is now officially bigger than Eris, one of hundreds of thousands of mini-planets and comet-like objects circling beyond Neptune in a region called the Kuiper Belt.

“The most dangerous time for a collision is when you pass through the plane of Pluto’s equator and when you pass all the other satellites”, the mission’s project scientist, Hal Weaver, told Wired. It was thought Eris was larger than Pluto and resulted in Pluto’s status as a full planet being revoked.

Noooo, stop asking this, please. The images of the Pluto Flyby will be released on Wednesday July 15 at 3 to 4pm.

But it probably won’t, and that really doesn’t matter, and please don’t get hung up on it! Love Pluto for what it is – Pluto. Because of that, New Horizons won’t be slowing down very much.

“Now we’re getting up close and personal, something that has never been done before”. Every single resource the craft passing Pluto is capable of using will be going toward capturing imagery and data on and around Pluto. “On the 15 the science data dump begins again”.

If the stopover goes as reported by NASA’s plan, a radio link will be reestablished a few minutes before 9 p.m. (GMT0100) and New Horizons will beam the new-found knowledge back to Earth. “Less than 900,000 miles from #Pluto & we’re still looking for new moons”, reads one tweet, while another says: “Trying to cloud watch… if there are clouds”. That’s why Tuesday is going to be so suspenseful. “I’m excited that we are finally here, and I’m just waiting to see that next image”.

Measuring Pluto’s size has been a decades-long challenge due to complicating factors from its atmosphere.

But it’s true that the photos taken during the actually flyby will blow these out of the water.

At precisely 7:49:57 a.m. EDT Tuesday, Earthlings are expected to get their closest glimpse ever of the Pluto system.

Why are we doing this?

There’s a good reason there are nine. In some ways, Pluto shares a lot in common with the thousands of bodies in the Kuiper belt – in effect it’s a “third type of planet“, to complement the rocky terrestrial planets like Earth, and the gas giants such as Jupiter.

When an NASA probe whizzes past Pluto on Tuesday, the man who discovered the dwarf planet 85 years ago will be there.

By the end of the day, cameras aboard New Horizons will have resolved features on Pluto’s surface as small as the ponds of Central Park or the runways of LAX.

This July 8, 2015 image provided by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute shows Pluto, right, and its moon, Charon, from the New Horizons’ long range reconnaissance imager.