We'll Be Visiting Pluto in a Year ... Sort Of

Exactly one year from today, a spacecraft will be "arriving" at Pluto—or so a planetary scientist puts it. More specifically, the New Horizons craft, about the size of a baby grand piano and carrying no one, will be passing closer to the dwarf planet than we've ever been before, NPR reports. The craft will be within 6,000 miles of Pluto; until now, "the closest any spacecraft had ever been to Pluto was ridiculously far—about a billion miles," says NASA scientist Alan Stern.

New Horizons will be snapping the best pictures of Pluto we've ever obtained, NPR notes. It's zooming at a million miles per day, Tech Times reports, but signals from the craft take four and a half hours to arrive back home. The mission's timing is very specific. "Not only did we choose the date, by the way, we chose the hour and the minute. And we're on track," Stern notes. "We're arriving at Pluto on the morning of the 14th of July 2015. It's Bastille day. To celebrate, we're storming the gates of Pluto." (More Pluto stories.)