[troutman]

Closest approach to Pluto in 11 days:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/n...ain/index.html



New Horizons is now less than 9.5 million miles (15 million kilometers) from the Pluto system. The spacecraft is healthy and all systems are operating normally.

Pluto closest approach is scheduled for July 14, 2015. As part of an extended mission, the spacecraft is expected to head farther into the Kuiper Belt to examine one or two of the ancient, icy mini-worlds in that vast region, at least a billion miles beyond Neptune’s orbit.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/spac...-new-horizons/

The spacecraft will go silent during the flyby

All told, New Horizons will spend about 12 hours in the Pluto system. As such, the NASA and Johns Hopkins University researchers behind the mission want to use all available resources to monitor the target. New Horizons will ping Earth as it begins the flyby, then focus solely on imaging the Pluto system and concentrating on its other scientific payload, such as a dust collector that will show how much debris is still in the system—a leftover from the collision that formed the five known moons.

We may discover even more moons

You get to see the images almost as fast as NASA does

We're eagerly the best new images of Pluto, and the NASA / JHU team is releasing them to this website almost as soon as they come in, creating a fast turnaround time for some astonishing views. It currently takes about 9 hours round-trip for NASA to send a message to New Horizons and for the craft to send information back.