( CNN ) NASA 's New Horizons spacecraft is closing in on Pluto and its five moons . Soon we will see what no one has ever seen before : Crisp , clear pictures of the tiny , icy world . `` The pictures are what we 're all waiting for , '' Alan Stern , New Horizons principal investigator , told CNN . Up until now , the best images of Pluto have been a few pixels shot by the Hubble Space Telescope . The images , released in 2010 , took four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to produce , according to Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder , Colorado . They show what NASA called an `` icy and dark molasses-colored , mottled world that is undergoing seasonal changes in its surface color and brightness . '' That 's not a very glamorous description , but NASA said the images confirmed Pluto is a `` dynamic world that undergoes dramatic atmospheric changes , not simply a ball of ice and rock . '' New Horizons is aiming its Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager ( LORRI ) telescope at Pluto to help navigate the final 135 million miles ( 220 kilometers ) of its 3 billion mile journey . Besides LORRI , the space probe is packed with cameras and other instruments . By mid-May , we should get `` better than Hubble '' photos . We 'll also see Pluto 's five moons : Charon , Nix , Hydra , Kerberos and Styx . Stern expects new `` optical navigation images '' to arrive any day now . `` I think of Pluto as a kind of a Christmas present that 's been sitting under the tree '' waiting to be unwrapped , Stern said . `` I just ca n't wait to see what 's there . '' New Horizons was launched on January 19 , 2006 . It will arrive at Pluto on July 14 , 2015 . The probe is 27 inches ( 0.7 meters ) tall , 83 inches ( 2.1 meters ) long and 108 inches ( 2.7 meters ) wide . It weighed 1,054 pounds ( 478 kilograms ) at launch . New Horizons was launched before the big debate started over whether it 's a planet . For the scientists on the New Horizons team , Pluto is very much a planet -- just a new kind of planet . `` New Horizons is on a journey to a new class of planets we 've never seen , in a place we 've never been before , '' says New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver of APL . `` For decades , we thought Pluto was this odd little body on the planetary outskirts ; now we know it 's really a gateway to an entire region of new worlds in the Kuiper Belt , and New Horizons is going to provide the first close-up look at them . '' Some interesting tidbits about Pluto : . -- Pluto is classified by NASA as a dwarf planet . -- It has five known moons : Charon , Nix , Hydra , Kerberos and Styx . -- Pluto is about two-thirds the diameter of Earth 's moon . -- It probably has a rocky core surrounded by ice . -- It 's one of a group of objects that orbit beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt . -- Pluto is about 20 times as massive than Ceres , the dwarf planet between Mars and Jupiter that will be explored by the Dawn spacecraft on March 6 , 2015 . -- Pluto has a 248-year-long elliptical orbit around the sun . -- From 1979 to 1999 , Pluto was actually closer to the sun than Neptune . -- Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff , Arizona . -- It was named by 11-year-old Venetia Burney of Oxford , England .
Earth 's first probe to Pluto is beginning its long encounter with the icy world . New Horizons will let us see the tiny planet for the first time ; it will arrive at Pluto in orbit .