About two weeks from its highly anticipated flyby of Pluto, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft performed its final maneuver to get on the desired track.

According to BBC News, New Horizons blasted its thrusters for 23 seconds to alter its speed and location ever so slightly to optimize its eventual flyby. NASA can still alter New Horizons' path, but will only do so if they detect potentially harmful debris in the way.

Yanping Guo, the New Horizons mission design chief at Johns Hopkins University, said in a press release the spacecraft would have been 20 seconds late and 114 miles from its desired path if not for the maneuver.

"This maneuver was perfectly performed by the spacecraft and its operations team," Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in the release. "Now we're set to fly right down the middle of the optimal approach corridor."

Launched in Jan. 2006, New Horizons is now nearly three billion miles from Earth and about 10 million miles from Pluto. The spacecraft is expected to gather data on Pluto's atmosphere, as well as other information on the dwarf planet and its largest moon, Charon. NASA expects transmissions from the spacecraft to ground control will take four-and-a-half hours.

New Horizons has already delivered never-before-seen images of Pluto and its moons, but the flyby should deliver even better ones thanks to the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI).

"We'll get spectroscopy, which will allow us to fingerprint whether the composition is different there. And soon we'll be able to start making atmospheric studies [of Pluto] and do some of the other things we came to do," Stern told BBC News. "We'll eventually get to a resolution of 80m per pixel with LORRI.

"So, if you were to fly over a typical city here on Earth, at the same altitude and looked with LORRI, you could spot major parks, you could spot runways; you could spot a football stadium and see the field inside. Things like that; it's going to be pretty incredible resolution."