Until 2015, Pluto, the former ninth planet of the classical solar system, was largely a mystery—a tiny speck 3.6 billion miles from the sun. When NASA's New Horizons spacecraft arrived at the ...

Because Pluto is so dim, you need a telescope to see it. “A backyard telescope could do it under the right conditions,” says ...

On July 14, 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft arrived at Pluto for the first time. The craft flew within 7,700 miles of the planet and is sending back reams of data and the highest resolution ...

The view extends from the “limb” of Pluto at the top of the strip, almost to the “terminator” (or day/night line) in the southeast of the encounter hemisphere, seen below.

This composite shows the progression of Pluto (circled) over the course of slightly more than a week in August 2023. As you can see, the tiny world is difficult to discern from the background ...

New discoveries of objects in the Kuiper Belt have also presented challenges for the Planet Nine theory. The latest is known ...

The image was taken with New Horizons’ Multi-spectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) from a distance of 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) to Pluto. The resolution is 700 meters (0.4 miles).

Pluto nearly fills the frame in this image from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. The image was taken on July 13, 2015, when the spacecraft was 476,000 miles (768,000 kilometers) from the surface.

Over the past decade, researchers have been puzzling through Pluto’s mysteries. Meanwhile, the New Horizons probe heads for interstellar space.