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| Image from the original article |
The best images of Pluto then available, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The New Horizons spacecraft was about to begin the first stage of its encounter campaign with Pluto, ultimately scheduled to pass closest to the surface of this trans-Neptunian object on July 14, 2015, travelling through the region of its five known moons.
The first preparation stage was to include imaging Pluto on January 25. As the spacecraft approached and the images gradually became clearer, they would give the navigation team a crucially improved view of the approximately 220 million kilometres remaining in the journey. The article notes that by late April the quality of New Horizons images of Pluto and its satellite system was expected to surpass images obtainable from Earth or by the Hubble Space Telescope.
By that point New Horizons had travelled about 5 billion kilometres on its way to what the article describes as the first trans-Neptunian body to be examined at close range by a human-made spacecraft.
Over the following months, the probe was expected to take hundreds of images of Pluto and its moons, allowing the team to estimate the spacecraft's position relative to the system more accurately. Until around May, however, most of those images would show little more than bright points against a dark background. Even so, they would provide the navigation team with enough information to perform trajectory-correction manoeuvres.
During these early encounter preparations, other scientific instruments aboard the spacecraft would also measure properties of the surrounding space environment, including dust particles and energetic charged particles originating from the Sun.
Only a few months remained—the anticipation was building.