imperfectsingularity:

just–space:

I’ve been getting lots of questions regarding New Horizons, so here are the details as far as I know: 

– New Horizons is a probe, launched by NASA. It is the first spacecraft to perform a flyby of Pluto. 

– Because of Pluto’s distance, there has never before been actual high-resolution photographs of Pluto. This will be the first time. 

– This will happen about 18 hours from now. 

– While this is happening the probe will act autonomously to try to photograph as much as possible. Because of how it will rotate to photograph Pluto and Charon, it will not be able to broadcast photos back as it is taking them. Photos you see tomorrow that claim to be from this flyby will be fake.

– Between 8:30 and 9:15 pm Eastern time New Horizons will ‘phone home’ to NASA to indicate whether or not it was successful. If successful, it is at this point that New Horizons will begin sending back images. 

– Sometime between 3pm and 4pm Eastern time on Wednesday the photographs will be released to the world. A few seconds later, they’ll be on this blog.