Space for the day

The BBC has an article by Jonathan Amos about Pluto:

The New Horizons probe, which is bearing down on Pluto, has captured its first color image (top) of the distant dwarf planet. The picture, just released by NASA, shows a reddish world accompanied by its biggest moon, Charon.
New Horizons is set to barrel past Pluto on 14 July 2015. It will acquire a mass of data that it will then return to Earth very slowly over the next sixteen months.
At the current separation of nearly five billion km, it takes nearly five hours for radio signals to come back. And the bit rate is painfully slow. But the encounter is set to be the major space event of 2015. It will complete the reconnaissance of the "classical nine" planets of our Solar System; New Horizon's flyby will mean every one has been visited at least once by a space probe.
However, not since Voyager 2 passed Neptune in the late 1980s has a new world been revealed up close in the same way as will occur in mid-July.
Today, our best pictures of the 2,300km-wide Pluto come from the Hubble telescope. They are just blobs, making it very hard to discern anything of scientific certainty.
But this will change when the approaching New Horizons spacecraft starts to return pictures that begin to better in resolution anything Hubble has managed.
New Horizons was 115 million kilometers, roughly the distance from the Sun to Venus, at the time this photo was taken. Even at this distance, it is possible to resolve some differences in appearance between the dwarf and its moon. One seems brighter than the other. When New Horizons flies by Pluto on 14 July 2015, it will deliver color images that show surface features as small as a few km across.
"The spacecraft is in perfect health; it's full of fuel; and it's carrying a scientific arsenal of seven instruments that are the most powerful suite of instruments ever brought to bear on the first reconnaissance of a new planet,” enthused Alan Stern, the New Horizons' principal investigator. "Nothing like this has been done in a quarter of a century and nothing like this is being planned again by any space agency. This is a real moment in time for you to watch us turn a point of light into a planet."

Rico says that Pluto (whether the Disney character or the celestial object) has never gotten the recognition it deserves...