NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is still on track to reach Pluto this time next summer, according to NASA.
"Not only did we choose the date, by the way, we chose the hour and the minute. And we're on track," says Stern, the principal investigator for NASA's Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission, according to a press release issued by the space agency.
The New Horizons spacecraft left Earth on a 3 billion mile journey to Pluto back in January 2006.
The spacecraft is the size of a baby piano, meaning there are no astronauts on New Horizons.
"We're arriving at Pluto on the morning of the 14th of July 2015," Stern says. "It's Bastille day. To celebrate we're storming the gates of Pluto."
At its closest approach, New Horizons will be about 6,000 miles from Pluto, Stern said. That distance was calculated to obtain the sharpest images without blurring and to avoid being pulled into Pluto's orbit, according to NPR.
"The closest any spacecraft had ever been to Pluto was ridiculously far, about a billion miles," Stern said. "And we've been within a billion miles of Pluto for years now, so every day we break our own record."
As of now, the best pictures taken of Pluto were done so by NASA's Hubble Telescope. Sometime in May 2015, the spacecraft will send home the clearest images of Pluto ever obtained.
"We actually call that our BTH date - Better Than Hubble," said Stern.
The New Horizons team did not know that Pluto was going to be downgraded to a dwarf planet the same year that the spacecraft launched.
"When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go down a long list of how often I've been surprised by the richness of nature," Stern said.
New Horizon's is expected to reach its targeted destination by July 14, 2015. It is programmed to go radio-silent on that date so it can collect data to send back to Earth.
It takes approximately 4.5 hours for a signal to reach Earth from New Horizon.
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