NASA probe closes in on Pluto and its largest moon Charon after nine year journey

After travelling for almost a decade, the space probe New Horizons is on the cusp of arriving at its distant, icy target: Pluto.

The probe will fly by Pluto and its largest moon Charon in July this year, after travelling for nine years at approximately 58,536km/h.

NASA has released images of Pluto and Charon snapped from 203 million km away by the spacecraft’s camera LORRI (Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager).

Grainy and indistinguishable from two blurry dots, the images have stirred up excitement as scientists anticipate what the probe’s camera will capture in 6 months’ time when it has a front-row view of the dwarf planet.

The images were released on February 4, the birthday of astronomer Clyde Tombaugh who discovered Pluto in 1930. He died in 1997.

Now known as a dwarf planet after having its title of major planet unceremoniously stripped in 2006, Pluto signals the last “local” territory the spacecraft will travel through.

Launched in January 2006, the $700 million New Horizons mission aims to map the temperature and surface composition of Pluto and Charon, examine their geology and search for additional moons.

It is expected the probe will fly within 13,600 km of the planet’s surface.

After its historic interaction, the spacecraft will investigate objects in the Kuiper Belt, a region that begins near the orbit of Neptune.

Loaded with an estimated trillion comets and extending out beyond Pluto, the area is billions of kilometres from earth, making close scientific examination difficult.