article_snippet.sent: The New Horizons spacecraft has taken The New Horizons spacecraft first colour image of Pluto and The New Horizons
article_snippet.sent: Taken from a distance of 71 million miles (115 million km), the blurry image doesn’t reveal a huge amount of detail - but the blurry image is a sign of things to come.
article_snippet.sent: And now The New Horizons spacecraft has taken The New Horizons spacecraft first colour image, shown, revealing the dwarf planet (the bigger blob) and The New Horizons spacecraft moon its largest moon Charon .
article_snippet.sent: After a journey of more than nine years, The New Horizons spacecraft is now reaching the climax of Nasa’s thrilling mission.
article_snippet.sent: Nasa’s has traveled longer than any space mission in history to reach Nasa’s primary target - with Nasa’s pedometer measuring more than three billion miles (4.8 billion km).
article_snippet.sent: In July this year New Horizons will become The New Horizons spacecraft.
article_snippet.sent: After passing the orbits of all the major planets from Earth to Neptune, New Horizons is now beginning New Horizons final leg of New Horizons 3 billion-mile (4.8 billion km) journey.
article_snippet.sent: But regardless, The mission is of huge importance for our understanding of how bodies form even at great distances from bodies host star.
article_snippet.sent: New Horizons is one of the great explorations of our time,’ said New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
article_snippet.sent: This makes the New Horizon mission particularly exciting, as This will reveal the surface of a world we know very little about.
article_snippet.sent: This is pure exploration; we’re going to turn points of light into a planet and a system of moons before your eyes!” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. '
article_snippet.sent: This 21st century encounter is going to be an exploration bonanza unparalleled in anticipation since the storied missions of Voyager in the 1980s.'
article_snippet.sent: When New Horizons' mission was first devised in 2001, New Horizons' mission was a mission to just Pluto and Charon, before the four smaller moons were discovered.
article_snippet.sent: But teams operating The New Horizons spacecraft are using these views to refine teams operating the spacecraft knowledge of Pluto’s location, and skillfully navigate New Horizons toward a precise target point 7,750 miles (12,500 kilometers) from Pluto surface.
article_snippet.sent: That targeting is critical, since the computer commands that will orient The New Horizons spacecraft and point That targeting science instruments are based on knowing the exact time and location that New Horizons passes Pluto.
article_snippet.sent: This image was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on 7 July 2012 . '
article_snippet.sent: Our team has worked hard to get to this point, and Our know Our have just one shot to make this work,' said Alice Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, MarylandMaryland. '
article_snippet.sent: Because this work gets one shot at this work target, New Horizons is designed to gather as much data as New Horizons can, as quickly as it can, taking about 100 times as much data on close approach as this work can send home before flying away.
article_snippet.sent: And although The New Horizons spacecraft will send select, high-priority datasets home in the days just before and after close approach, The mission will continue returning the data stored in onboard memory for a full 16 months.
highlights_snippet.sent: And New Horizons has now released New Horizons first colour image - from 71 million miles away .
  