Pluto: Nasa probe set for fly-past of frozen ‘dwarf planet’
by Joel Achenbach for the Washington Post from on (#D9AX)
With much skill - and some luck - the New Horizons spacecraft is about to provide our closest glimpse yet of the frozen and little-understood world of Pluto
Pluto is so far away (4.8bn km) and so small (about two-thirds the size of the Earth's moon) that we've never had a good look at it, not even with the Hubble space telescope. In Hubble images, Pluto has always been a tiny, pixelated blob. Until now.
Related: Target Pluto: fastest spaceship set for epic encounter with our remotest planet
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