Pluto just 4 weeks, 20 million miles away for spacecraft
Bymarcia Dunn
This image made available by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute on June 11, 2015 shows four computer-enhanced views of Pluto, taken by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI). (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute via AP) NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is at Pluto’s doorstep, following an incredible journey of nine years and 3 billion miles. As of Tuesday, New Horizons was just over 20 million miles from Pluto. That’s closer than Earth is to neighbor Venus, at their closest point. It’s really a mission of raw exploration, flying into the unknown to see what’s there.