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New Horizons Just Hours Away from Completing Historic Pluto Flyby

The flyby will happen at 7:49 a.m. EDT, NASA says

Jul 14, 2015 07:02 GMT  ·  By
Historic Pluto flyby will happen in a few hours
   Historic Pluto flyby will happen in a few hours

In just a few hours, NASA's New Horizons probe will buzz by the Pluto system at the edge of the Solar System. The historic flyby, expected to happen at 7:49 a.m. EDT - give or take a couple of minutes - will bring the spacecraft within just 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) of the dwarf planet. 

To reach the Pluto system and have a close look at it, the probe has journeyed through space for 9 years and has covered a distance of over 3 billion miles (nearly 5 billion kilometers).

The spacecraft launched from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, US, back in January 2006. It is now less than 155,000 miles (250,000 kilometers) from its target.

New Horizons will fly by the dwarf planet and its accompanying moons at a speed about 30,800 miles per hour (almost 50,000 kilometers per hour), which is actually faster than a bullet.

“It'll go by, and shoot fast, because it can't stop, and then it's gone,” explained Georgia State University astronomer Sebastien Lepine in an interview.

The flyby of the Pluto system, which will only last for a couple of hours, will allow the probe to image the dwarf planet and its moons in unprecedented detail. The images will then be sent to Earth.

What New Horizons has so far revealed about Pluto

Although it has not yet made its closest approach of the Pluto system, the New Horizons spacecraft has already delivered precious information revealing the particularities of its target.

Thanks to this NASA probe, astronomers now know that dwarf planet Pluto has an ice cap and that nitrogen is escaping from the orb's atmosphere. Besides, New Horizons found the orb to be slightly larger than previously assumed.

Thus, it appears that Pluto's actual diameter is one of 1,473 miles (some 2,370 kilometers). This means that the dwarf planet is approximately 50 miles (80 kilometers) wider than believed.

Courtesy of this latest measurement of its girth, Pluto was revealed to be the largest body in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of the Solar System. Previously, the title was held by Eris, another dwarf planet with a diameter of 1,445 miles (2,326 km).

Apart from Pluto, New Horizons has had the chance to measure accompanying moons Charon, Nix and Hydra, and found them to have a diameter of 751 miles (1,208 kilometers), 20 miles (35 kilometers) and 30 miles (45 kilometers), respectively.

As of now, there are less than 5 hours left until NASA's New Horizon's probe flies by dwarf planet Pluto. Well, fingers crossed and let's hope everything will go as planned.

Update: It's happened. New Horizons reached Pluto.