... A "heart" from Pluto as flyby begins . ... PLUTO | ... NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI . After a more than nine-year, 3-billion-mile (5 billion kilometers) journey to Pluto, it s show time for NASA s New Horizons spacecraft, as the flyby sequence of science observations is officially underway. ... The image was taken July 7, when the spacecraft was just under 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) from Pluto, and is the first to be received since the July 4 anomaly that sent the spacecraft into safe mode. ...