Long, Strange Trip
Pluto's trek around our Sun takes 248 years - so long it still hasn't finished one orbit since it was discovered in 1930. The planet's orbit is so elliptical - picture a squashed circle - its distance from the Sun varies more than 2,700,000,000 km (1,900,000,000 miles).

Deep Freeze
Pluto is so cold even the air can freeze and fall to the ground like snow. The planet's average temperature is about minus 233° C ( minus 387° F). The coldest spot on Earth gets down to minus 89° C (-128° F).

Distance Runner
Even though it will travel at speeds 30 times greater than the fastest fighter jet, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will still take 9 1/2 years to get to Pluto. If you could somehow fly an airliner to Pluto, the trip would take more than 800 years.

Bring a Flashlight
High noon on Pluto would look a lot like a moonlit night here on Earth. The sunlight that reaches Pluto is about 1,000 times dimmer than what we see here on Earth and provides little warmth.

Camera-Shy Planet
Pluto is so small and so far from Earth it is currently impossible to get good pictures. Even our most powerful telescopes show little more than fuzzy blobs when pointed across billions of kilometers at Pluto and Charon.

Faint Discovery
There are millions of stars brighter than Pluto in the night sky, but observant astronomer Clyde Tombaugh caught a faint image - light equal to a candle seen at a distance of 480 km (300 miles) - on a photographic plate that turned out to be Pluto. He had discovered the mysterious ninth planet.