Photos of Pluto — The best images from NASA's New Horizons mission

We never saw Pluto up close before. But NASA's New Horizons probe flew within 7,750 miles of it Tuesday morning — and now it's showing us the beloved dwarf planet and its five moons for the first time.

No spacecraft had ever been sent to Pluto, and because it's so small and so far away, we can't see it well with telescopes. So until very recently, the best photos of Pluto we had — taken by the Hubble Space Telescope — showed it as a blurry blob:

(NASA/ESA/M. Buie)

Pluto, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2003.

But New Horizons has changed that in a big way:

The spacecraft also showed us Pluto's five moons — including the largest, Charon:

Charon, as seen by New Horizons during the flyby. (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

This is the first photo ever taken of Pluto's tiny moon Hydra:

Hydra, as seen by New Horizons during the flyby. (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

These photos are a long time coming. For years, NASA scientists fought for a Pluto mission but were unable to secure enough funding from Congress. During the 1990s, four different proposed Pluto missions were canceled:

The many proposed Pluto missions that led to New Horizons. (Jason Davis/The Planetary Society)

Eventually, in 2003, their work led to the approval of New Horizons: a slimmed-down, lightweight probe that still carried a suite of seven scientific instruments to photograph Pluto, analyze its atmosphere, and tell us more about its surface geology:

(NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)

The spacecraft was built at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in Maryland:

(JHU/APL)

In 2006, the probe was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida — traveling 36,373 miles per hour, faster than any spacecraft has ever left Earth. It was launched at this speed so it could reach distant Pluto in a reasonable amount of time:

It's since traveled more than 3 billion miles to reach Pluto:

New Horizons' trajectory through the solar system. (JHU/APL)

In 2007, New Horizons swung by Jupiter, in order to use the planet's immense gravity as a slingshot toward Pluto. While it was there, it took stunning photos of the gas giant: