New Pictures of Pluto Released By NASA as 'New Horizons' Spaceship Makes Flyby

NASA's New Horizons spaceship has reached the closest it's location to Pluto after nine years of travel from Earth. It was less than 8,000 miles from the dwarf planet as of July 14th and is continuing to collect data on Pluto and its moons. NASA released a color photo of Pluto on Instagram this morning.

The photos are the clearest yet we've seen of Pluto. The surface is visible, including a dark equator and a heart-shaped feature that's captured a lot of attention.

Pluto was first discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, when he was 24-years-old. Tombaugh's ashes were placed on board New Horizons, so they can fly to the dwarf planet he found. His children were cheering in the crowd at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, where the mission is being controlled, on Tuesday when New Horizons approached Pluto.

New Horizons is scheduled to continue moving and collecting data. It is supposed to "phone home" on Tuesday afternoon to let people back on Earth know that it survived, but it will take four and a half hours for that message to reach mission control. NASA is expecting to hear from the spaceship by 9pm EST Tuesday night.

"The New Horizons team is proud to have accomplished the first exploration of the Pluto system," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said. "This mission has inspired people across the world with the excitement of exploration and what humankind can achieve."

The spaceship, which is around the size of a grand piano, is traveling at over 31,000 miles per hour -- it was the fastest spaceship ever launched at the time, according to NASA. New, more detailed photos are expected to be released on Wednesday. The photos and data NASA is receiving should help them figure out what the planet is made out of and give clues on how our solar system was formed.