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.

Pluto is a dwarf planet. The body that decides the classification of objects in the solar system, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), indicates that their "...Resolution means that the Solar System officially consists of eight planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. A new distinct class of objects called dwarf planets was also decided on. It was agreed that planets and dwarf planets are two distinct classes of objects. The first members of the dwarf planet category are Ceres, Pluto and Eris, formerly known as 2003 UB313." For more on this decision, see: http://www.iau.org/public_press/themes/pluto/.