NASA's Pluto probe is called New Horizons.

It is under construction right now with a preliminary launch date of 2006. It will take about 10 years to get all the way out there. After the flyby of Pluto and its moon, Charon, the spacecraft will continue into the unexplored Kuiper Belt region.

Read more about the mission.

If I understand the question you are asking, you think that the heat needed to vaporize the surface ices would be enough to be uncomfortably hot for humans. In fact, the opposite is true. Assuming that (as in the case of Neptune's moon, Triton) the ice is solid nitrogen, it evaporates rapidly, thus forming an atmosphere, at 40 K (= -233 Celsius = -387 Fahrenheit), an almost unimaginably cold temperature for humans.

Pluto is very small - smaller than our own moon - and very far away. At it's closest, Pluto is about 2.7 billion miles (2,700,000,000 miles!) from our Sun. Because of its odd orbit around our sun (imagine a squished circle), Pluto can go out as far as 4.7 billion miles. That makes it a tough target even for very powerful telescopes. We have better pictures of all the other planets because spacecraft have visited them. NASA is sending a spacecraft called New Horizons (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/) out there, but the trip will take almost 9 1/2 years. It won't get there until 2016. It is very difficult to build a spaceship that can go that far.

You are right that Pluto is a lot closer than the galaxies you see in pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. Pluto -- and Earth and all the other planets in our solar system -- are actually part of a galaxy called the Milky Way. Our solar system is a very, very small part of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Galaxies are huge. They are made up of billions of stars. Our sun is just one of the stars in the Milky Way. Some stars have planets orbiting them, a little like our solar system. The pictures on this website will help you get an idea of just how big a galaxy is compared to Earth and our solar system: http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/cosmic/cosmic.html

So to answer you question, even though Pluto is a lot closer than all the galaxies out there, it is so small and far from Earth that it is very hard to photograph. Galaxies are huge and easier to see with powerful instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope. We will have to wait for a spacecraft to fly by before we will get a good look at Pluto.

Yes, Pluto is a planet. The body that decides the classification of objects in the solar system, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), has no plans to change Pluto's status as a planet and has decided against assigning it a minor planet number. For more on this decision, see: http://www.iau.org/IAU/FAQ/PlutoPR.html.

The IAU considers the discussion closed with this statement and does not intend to reopen it in the foreseeable future. Other scientists and organizations may have different opinions on the classification of Pluto, but while it may be trendy to declare that Pluto is not a planet, it isn't accurate - the only official decision belongs to the IAU.

There has been some confusion over this issue because a number of large icy bodies have been discovered in orbits beyond Pluto, in an area known as the Kuiper Belt. These bodies are believed to be hundreds of kilometers in diameter, leading to speculation that still larger bodies (essentially giant comets) exist in this region, including some approaching the size of Pluto. Recent studies of Pluto's composition have also led to the idea that Pluto was once one of these bodies. However, Pluto's chemical make-up and origin don't affect Pluto's designation as a planet (any more than the Earth's make-up and composition would cause us to reclassify it as a giant asteroid.)

Whether these other bodies in the Kuiper Belt will ever be designated as planets remains to be seen.

There is no set scientific law as to what constitutes a planet, but as a rule of thumb, there are three properties of a planet: (1) It must (directly) orbit a star, (2) It must be small enough that it has not been undergoing internal nuclear fusion (i.e. it is not a star or star-like object), (3) It must be large enough that its self-gravity gives it the general shape of a sphere. You might notice that under these rules, the asteroid Ceres could qualify as a planet - I guess we're hedging our bets by calling it a "minor planet".

In the final analysis, the designation of "planet" is more a historical issue than a scientific one. It seems likely that Pluto will always be considered a planet.