At just under five million miles from Pluto, New Horizons' latest image of the dwarf planet is not crystal clear, but a heart-shaped spot is distinct.
According to BBC News, New Horizons took the photo Tuesday from about five million miles away and advanced almost two million miles as of Thursday.
"The next time we see this part of Pluto at closest approach, a portion of this region will be imaged at about 500 times better resolution than we see today," Jeff Moore, the geology, geophysics and imaging team leader at NASA's Ames Research Center, said in a press release. "It will be incredible!"
New Horizons launched nine years ago and has traversed more than three billion miles through space to get to this point. Last week, New Horizons performed its final maneuver in order to get on the ideal path for its July 14 flyby of Pluto.
On Wednesday, NASA confirmed New Horizons entered the "Encounter Sequence." But in between, NASA experienced a brief glitch with its Pluto-chasing probe, losing communications for a short period of time. Mission managers determined it was an unforeseen anomaly and New Horizons has since resumed regular operations.
"They're still a little blurry but they're by far the best pictures we've ever seen of Pluto, and they're only going to get better," John Spencer from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., told BBC News. "Right now they're just showing us that Pluto is really weird. It's got some extremely dark areas, some extremely bright areas, and we don't know what any of them are yet."
