Pluto Approach
The first images of Pluto from New Horizons were created between September 21–24, 2006, during a test of the LORRI. They were released on November 28. The images, taken from a distance of approximately 4.2 billion kilometers (2.6 billion miles), confirmed the spacecraft's ability to track distant targets, critical for maneuvering toward Pluto and other Kuiper belt objects.
It is planned for New Horizons to fly within 10,000 km (6,200 mi) of Pluto in 2015. New Horizons will have a relative velocity of 13.78 km/s at closest approach, and will come as close as 27,000 km (17,000 mi) to Charon, although these parameters may be changed during flight.
Read more about this topic: New Horizons
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“There is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the Almanac, to hang over the farmer’s hearth,—how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. No philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, or nature, or spirit; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)