Faces of Pluto

As the New Horizons spacecraft gets closer to its encounter with the dwarf planet Pluto, some fantastic images are starting to stream in from its current location almost 3 billion miles from Earth.
At that distance it takes about 4hrs and 20min for the signal to get to us from the spacecraft.

New Horizons is a little over 18 million miles from Pluto, moving at 8.6 miles per second, or about 31,000 MPH!

These images, taken by New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), show four different "faces" of Pluto as it rotates about its axis with a period of 6.4 days. All the images have been rotated to align Pluto's rotational axis with the vertical direction (up-down) on the figure, as depicted schematically in the upper left.

New Horizons is just over 25 days and 12 hours to its historic rendezvous with Pluto.
 
For lots of up-to-the-minute information on the mission, check out New Horizons.