Mark Your Calendars: In A Year, We'll Arrive At Pluto 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute 
 
 Planetary scientist Alan Stern is counting down the days — just 365 of them now. He has spent the past 8 1/2 years waiting for the New Horizons spacecraft to make a close encounter with Pluto. Next year, on July 14, the spacecraft will reach its destination. 
 
 "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. 
 
 In January 2006, the New Horizons spacecraft left Earth on the 3-billion-mile journey to Pluto and beyond. 
 
 "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." 
 
 To be clear, this is an unmanned flyby mission by a spacecraft about the size and shape of a baby grand piano. No humans or robots will be landing and walking around. 
 
 " 'Arriving's' a little bit of a squishy term, I know. At closest approach, we'll be about 6,000 miles from Pluto," Stern says. 
 
 That distance was carefully calculated to ensure the sharpest images without blurring (the spacecraft is going really fast) and to avoid getting pulled into Pluto's orbit. And 6,000 miles away is still much, much closer than we've ever been before. 
 
 "The closest any spacecraft had ever been to Pluto was ridiculously far — about a billion miles," Stern says. "And we've been within a billion miles of Pluto for years now, so every day we break our own record." 
 
 Months before we get to that closest approach, we'll start getting the best images of Pluto we've ever seen. So far, the best Pluto pictures are from the Hubble Telescope. By May of next year, New Horizons will be sending home better images. 
 
 Stern says, "We actually call that our BTH date — Better Than Hubble." 
 
 A great deal of planning went into this mission. But in case you're wondering, the New Horizons team did not plan for Pluto to be downgraded to a dwarf planet in the same year as the launch. 
 
 That didn't change anything for Alan Stern. Some planetary scientists still dispute Pluto's planet status, and Stern says he'll always think of Pluto as a planet. 
 
 Either way, it's a distant realm ripe for exploration. Scientists don't actually know what exactly they will see there. And that's the exciting part. 
 
 "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," he says. 
 
 So now, we wait. 
 
 "You'll just have to wait just like we will to unwrap this present," Stern says. "Save the date — July 14, 2015: humankind's encounter with Pluto." 
 
 It takes about 4 1/2 hours for a signal to reach Earth from New Horizons. The spacecraft is programmed to go radio silent on July 14 so it can collect as much data as possible. The first batch of images will come down the next day. 
 
 The New Horizons spacecraft is healthy and full of fuel, so after the Pluto encounter, it will keep going beyond Pluto and into the outer rim of our solar system. 
 
 If you'd like to stay on top of New Horizons' progress to the second, check out the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory countdown clock. ||||| Exactly one year from now, on July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft will reach Pluto, and is set to give us the first close-up images of what the mysterious dwarf planet is like. 
 
 The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) New Horizons took off from Earth in January 2006 for a three-billion-mile journey to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt in the outer reaches of our solar system. The Kuiper Belt is a disc-shaped region of icy objects located beyond the orbit of Neptune. 
 
 "We're arriving at Pluto on the morning of the 14th of July 2015," says planetary scientist Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission. "It's Bastille day. To celebrate, we're storming the gates of Pluto." 
 
 Only as big as a grand piano, New Horizons is on an unmanned flyby mission to Pluto and beyond. The spacecraft will not actually land on the surface of the dwarf planet. It will only get as close as 6,000 miles away, a distance that was carefully calculated by Stern and his team to guarantee the clearest, sharpest images of Pluto's surface as possible. 
 
 This is the closest mankind can so far get to Pluto. The best images we have at the moment were taken by the Hubble space telescope, which provide nothing more than a few blurry markings on the surface of Pluto. 
 
 Months before the scheduled approach, New Horizons will be able to take distant photos, which Stern says will be nothing more than "fat pixels" of Pluto and its largest moon Charon by January next year. As the vehicle nears by April, it will be able to take photos more detailed than the ones taken by Hubble. 
 
 "The closest any spacecraft had ever been to Pluto was ridiculously far - about a billion miles," says Stern. "And we've been within a billion miles of Pluto for years now, so every day we break our own record." 
 
 The vehicle is soaring on its nine-and-a-half-year journey into space at an almost unbelievable speed of one million miles per day. This means it will only have a few days to explore the unknown world of Pluto and its five moons before it leaves the known edge of the solar system into the unknown realm beyond. 
 
 New Horizons is expected to go silent on July 14, 2015 so it can gather as much data about Pluto as possible. The spacecraft will then take around four and a half hours to send the information it has collected in signals back to Earth. 
 
 "You'll just have to wait just like we will to unwrap this present," says Stern. "Save the data - July 14, 2015 - humankind's encounter with Pluto." 
 
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– 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."