A quarter-century after NASA's Voyager 2 probe passed Neptune, the New Horizons spacecraft has entered the planet's orbit en route to Pluto.

According to NBC News, the Horizons probe is scheduled to rendezvouses with Pluto on July 14, 2015, marking the first close encounter with the distant planet and its moons. NASA launched New Horizons into space eight and half years ago.

As New Horizons passed Neptune, the probe snapped a photo of it and Triton, the planet's largest moon as a tip-of-the-cap to the Voyager 2. The photo was taken last month when the spacecraft was an estimated 2.5 billion miles away.

"It's a cosmic coincidence that connects one of NASA's iconic past outer solar system explorers, with our next outer solar system explorer," Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division at the D.C. headquarters, said in a press release. "Exactly 25 years ago at Neptune, Voyager 2 delivered our 'first' look at an unexplored planet. Now it will be New Horizons' turn to reveal the unexplored Pluto and its moons in stunning detail next summer on its way into the vast outer reaches of the solar system."

Mission managers said New Horizons should be getting a better look at Pluto than the Hubble Telescope can manage by next May and, by July, the photos should be better than Voyager 2's ever were.

"NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 explored the entire middle zone of the solar system where the giant planets orbit," Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in the release. "Now we stand on Voyager's broad shoulders to explore the even more distant and mysterious Pluto system."

After getting a good look at Triton in 1989, scientists speculated that it was more like Pluto than Neptune and that the latter may have pulled it away from the former. But that is just one anticipated aspect of the New Horizons flyby next summer.

"No country except the United States has the demonstrated capability to explore so far away," Stern said. "The U.S. has led the exploration of the planets and space to a degree no other nation has, and continues to do so with New Horizons. We're incredibly proud that New Horizons represents the nation again as NASA breaks records with its newest, farthest and very capable planetary exploration spacecraft."