It may be blurry and a little far off, but this is humanity’s first ever color image of the dwarf planet Pluto, which NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is due to visit on July 14.

The snap of Pluto and its largest moon Charon was taken by the Ralph colour imager aboard the space probe on April 9 from about 71 million miles away – roughly the distance from the Sun to Venus.

As exciting as this first colour pic is, it’s just the beginning of New Horizons’ historic encounter with Pluto, which will culminate in a flyby on July 14 yielding images that will show surface features as small as a few miles across.

“Scientific literature is filled with papers on the characteristics of Pluto and its moons from ground based and Earth orbiting space observations, but we’ve never studied Pluto up close and personal,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, in a statement.

This first color picture of Pluto and Charon was taken by the Ralph color imager on the New Horizons spacecraft on April 9. (Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)

“In an unprecedented flyby this July, our knowledge of what the Pluto system is really like will expand exponentially and I have no doubt there will be exciting discoveries.”

New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft ever launched and has travelled for a longer time and farther away than any space mission in history. It has already flown for more than nine years across three billion miles to get to its primary target, the farthest one-time planet of our Solar System.

If it’s successful, it’s also possible that New Horizons could go farther still, reaching the other mysterious small rocky planets and asteroids of the Kuiper Belt out beyond Neptune’s orbit. Reaching this “third zone” of the Solar System, beyond the inner, rocky worlds and outer gas giants, has been a space ambition for years, ranked by the National Academy of Sciences as the top priority planetary mission of the coming decade in the early 2000s.

“This is pure exploration; we’re going to turn points of light into a planet and a system of moons before your eyes!” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). “New Horizons is flying to Pluto – the biggest, brightest and most complex of the dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt. This 21st century encounter is going to be an exploration bonanza unparalleled in anticipation since the storied missions of Voyager in the 1980s.”

Pluto is the primary target as the largest known body in the Kuiper Belt, with a nitrogen atmosphere, complex seasons and an ice-rock interior that could harbour an ocean. But its largest moon Charon may also have an atmosphere or interior ocean and possibly even evidence of recent surface activity.

Pluto also has four other smaller moons to explore, which hadn’t even been discovered yet when New Horizons launched in 2001.

The spacecraft only gets one shot at the July flyby, so it’s been designed to gather as much data as possible, as quickly as possible and storing about a hundred times as much of that information as it’ll be able to send home before flying away. That will hopefully keep the mission returning data home from its onboard memory for a full 16 months after the close encounter.

“Our team has worked hard to get to this point, and we know we have just one shot to make this work,” said Alice Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), which built and operates the spacecraft. “We’ve plotted out each step of the Pluto encounter, practiced it over and over, and we’re excited the ‘real deal’ is finally here.”

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