Some cool facts regarding the new Horizons' flyby of pluto..

​Pluto's moon Hydra, which is covered by water-ice.

Some of the facts New Horizons' flyby:

1. Receiving all that data is another huge challenge. Because New Horizons is so far away, it takes about 4.5 hours for any data it sends back to reach Earth. And the signal is so faint that NASA has to use 200-foot-wide radio dishes (one each in Australia, California, and Spain) to pick it up.
2. Photos will take a bit longer because of New Horizons' extremely low rate of data transmission: about 1 kilobit per second, more than 50 times slower than a 56k modem from the '90s. This is because of the huge distance between Pluto and Earth, and it means that it'll take more than 42 minutes for New Horizons to fully transmit an image that's 1024 pixels wide.
3. Because it takes so long to send data back from Pluto, though, we won't have all of the photos and scientific data for a full 16 months, so scientists will have to be patient.
4. They estimate there's a 1 in 10,000 chance it could collide with a piece of debris instead.
5. The probe will also gather lots of scientific data on Pluto's atmosphere, temperature, and geology. All of this will happen on autopilot, since it takes 4.5 hours for any signals sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft.
6. New Horizons will fly by Pluto at an extremely high speed, traversing its diameter in a little less than three minutes. Fourteen minutes later, it'll make its closest approach to Pluto's moon Charon and take photos of its other four moons, as well. In the short flyby, the probe should take more than 150 extremely detailed photos.
7. The probe will investigate not only Pluto but also its five moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra.
8. Since the observations are all run on an automated command sequence, New Horizons must fly a perfect path past Pluto, and with perfect timing - otherwise its cameras will shoot empty sky where the dwarf or its moons are expected to be. This has necessitated aiming New Horizons at a "keyhole" in space just 100km by 150km (60miles by 90 miles), and arriving at that location within a set margin of 100 seconds.
9. The mission team will not celebrate until New Horizons contacts Earth again, which should happen at 00:53 GMT Wednesday (01:53 BST).
10. There is a very small possibility that New Horizons could be lost as it flies through the Pluto system. Any stray icy debris would be lethal if it collides with the spacecraft at its 14km/s velocity (31,000mph).
11. As an insurance policy, the mission team therefore downlinked one last set of data from all seven of the probe's instruments on Monday