The New Horizons probe, which is bearing down on Pluto, has captured its first colour image of the distant dwarf planet.
The picture, just released by the US space agency, shows a reddish world accompanied by its biggest moon, Charon.
New Horizons is set to barrel past Pluto on 14 July.
It will acquire a mass of data that it will then return to Earth very slowly over the course of the next 16 months.
At the current separation of nearly five billion km, it takes 4.6 hours for radio signals to come back. And the bit rate is painfully slow.
But the encounter is set to be the major space event of 2015. It will complete the reconnaissance of the "classical nine" planets of our Solar System; New Horizon's flyby will mean everyone has been visited at least once by a space probe.
However, not since the Voyager 2 satellite passed Neptune in the late 1980s has a new world been revealed up close in the same way as will occur in mid-July.
Today, our best pictures of the 2,300km-wide Pluto come from the Hubble telescope. They are just blobs that make it very hard to discern anything of scientific certainty.
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