NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is all set for its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, Tuesday. After travelling for more than nine years, the spacecraft has finally reached the moment to fly by Pluto and provide important details of the planet to researchers.

Travelling at more than 30,000 miles per hour, the spacecraft's flyby will only take around three minutes. This means New Horizons needs to make sure that its instruments are deployed at the right times to gather all the data required to get significant insight into the dwarf planet.

Currently, the spacecraft's Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) is capturing photographs of the planet to use for optical navigation. The starfield behind Pluto and its moons have also been captured by the spacecraft.

The navigation images are being reviewed by two teams, one at California-based KinetX Aerospace and the other The Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab, in order to control the direction of New Horizons.

"They look at those images and compare them to the known starfields, and come up with where we are in space. I can happily say that as of Saturday morning, in the last set of optical navigation images, Pluto is right where it's supposed to be", said Gabe Rogers, New Horizons' lead guidance and control engineer.

Efforts are being made by mission controllers to determine the precise distance of New Horizons from Pluto, and daily updates have been made over the last few weeks.

Pluto was discovered in 1930 and one year there is of 248 Earth-years, which is why researchers have not been able see the dwarf planet completing a full orbit around the sun.