Pluto, we're ready for your close-up

After nine-and-half years spent traveling 3.3 billion miles, the unmanned $700 million spacecraft New Horizons operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will get within 7,800 miles of Pluto on Tuesday.

The spacecraft has been sent specifically to take pictures of Pluto, a part of the solar system that has been in deep freeze for billions of years.

"Whatever these images will show will be an amazing discovery,” said Francisco Diego, Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London.

Diego said the spacecraft did not have any fuel or any powerful rockets to decrease the speed and go around orbit so it would just fly past Pluto.

A space tracking center in an Australian valley will receive the first close-up images, and the data will be relayed to a tracking station at Canberra's Deep Space Communication Complex (CDSCC).

"It's very exciting because we have never ever visited Pluto, either by robots or man missions because it is so far away," said CDSCC Director Ed Kruzins.

Up to now, little has been known about Pluto, the most distant planetary body in the solar system and the last to be explored by NASA. Pluto is in the Kuiper Belt, and this is the first time a spacecraft has entered the area.

Pluto was downgraded from a planet to a dwarf planet in 2006 and is thought to contain important clues about the origins of the solar system.

"There's a feeling among scientists that Pluto probably will tell us what the early solar system looked like and it's now locked in deep freeze and maybe it will tell us what we once were, a long time ago," Kruzins said.

New Horizons, the fastest spacecraft ever launched, is due to send a “phone home” signal that will be received by the Australian tracking station on Wednesday — a key message that will determine if the mission has been a success.

Each piece of data will then take about four-and-half hours to transmit, with the full dataset taking about 15 months to complete.

New Horizons will travel at 36,039 miles per hour past Pluto, Kruzins said, which could pose a problem if there is any space debris.

"Even a grain of sand would cause significant damage to the vehicle, it would be like being hit by a brick at 70 kilometers per hour," Kruzins said. Seventy kilometers is about 43.5 mph.

The tracking station, 20 miles from the capital of Canberra, is part of NASA's Deep Space network and is one of only three tracking stations in the world.

New Horizons will be at its closest to Pluto for about 24 hours before continuing on its journey to the outer solar system.

Last week, NASA unveiled a new map of Pluto, created using imaged gathered by New Horizons.

Al Jazeera with wire services