NASA has reported that its New Horizons spacecraft was nearly six million miles away from Pluto as of Monday. The distance was about 25 times the distance from Earth to the moon. The spacecraft is quickly going closer to the Pluto and is expected to pass less than 7,800 miles above Pluto's surface about 7:50 am Eastern time July 14.

A young astronomer named Clyde W. Tombaugh discovered Pluto 85 years ago and researchers have been able to know a lot more about it than a tiny dot in the sky since then. NASA's New Horizons is the first ever spacecraft to extract details of Pluto by illuminating mysterious dark regions on its surface.

"I said we would find a Pluto that was two words: something wonderful. It's turning out to be completely true. The Pluto system is turning out to be completely amazing", said Alan Stern, mission's principal investigator.

Researchers once thought that Pluto was a singular strange body in a dull, empty expanse of space. However, it is now believed that the dwarf planet is the perfect example of what astronomers call the third zone of the solar system.

There are millions of icy worlds beyond the rocky planets like Earth and the gas giants like Jupiter. These all are revolving around the sun in what is known as the Kuiper belt, named after Gerard Kuiper, an astronomer who had first talked about the idea of some comets coming into existence from the depths of the solar system.