Live Blog: New Horizons’ Historic Pluto Flyby

When it comes to landmark achievements in space exploration, today will be a date for the history books as the day humanity reached Pluto for the first time.

The spacecraft is set to flyby Pluto later today and the measurements it took indicates the radius of the dwarf planet spans 736 miles (1,185 kilometers), plus or minus six miles.

New Horizons, the fastest spacecraft ever launched, is due to send a “phone home” signal that will be received by the Australian tracking station on Wednesday – a key message that will determine if the mission has been a success. “Earth is getting its first chance for an up close and personal peek at Pluto, the ball of rock and ice orbiting at the furthest edge of our solar system”, Google said.

You can also watch a live webcast on NASA TV as New Horizons zooms in closest to the dwarf planet at 7:49 a.m. EDT Tuesday (roughly 5.19 PM IST).

“The Pluto system is enchanting in its strangeness, its alien beauty”, said Stern, a planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Once the spacecraft has screamed past Pluto it will tilt its cameras towards Charon, the largest of the moons.

The mission released a new image of the dwarf planet, and the Kuiper Belt solar system in which its sits.

Pluto, our solar system’s lovably puny outlier and everyone’s favourite demoted planet, is less puny than we thought. The photo, taken while New Horizons was still 476,000 miles from Pluto, shows the large heart-shaped region seen in earlier images with hints of eroded impact craters and stark brightness variations across its salmon-colored surface. While the orbiting Hubble telescope has been able to provide small, grainy images of Pluto, New Horizons will be able to photograph Pluto at such a fine level that features the size of a football pitch will be visible. New Horizons can not make observations and send back data at the same time, so scientists opted for maximum science during those most critical hours.

During the flyby – which will last around two hours – New Horizons will be busy collecting data. This unknown territory is a shooting gallery of comets and other small bodies.