We’re getting closer! First colour image of the planet and its moon that man has never seen close-up before is snapped ahead of Nasa's New Horizons arrival in July.

After a journey of more than nine years, Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft is now reaching the climax of its thrilling mission.

It has traveled longer than any space mission in history to reach its primary target - with its pedometer measuring more than three billion miles (4.8 billion km).

Its arrival at Pluto will be the last world in the ‘classical solar system’ to be explored.

Pluto was demoted from a ‘planet’ to a ‘dwarf planet’ in 2006 when other objects of a similar or greater size were found.

But regardless, the mission is of huge importance for our understanding of how bodies form even at great distances from their host star.

‘New Horizons is one of the great explorations of our time,’ said New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

‘There’s so much we don’t know, not just about Pluto, but other worlds like it.

‘We’re not rewriting textbooks with this historic mission - we’ll be writing them from scratch.’

The latest image of Pluto and Charon was captured by the Ralph camera on the spacecraft from a distance equivalent to the sun to Venus.

At a relative speed of 30,000 mph (50,000km), New Horizons will cover that distance in just three months.

The image shows Pluto with a sort of reddish colour and Charon - which is just over half the size of Pluto - considerably dimmer. 

Our best images of Pluto so far are mostly attempts from Hubble - but they are not much better than this photo.

This makes the New Horizon mission particularly exciting, as it will reveal the surface of a world we know very little about. 

Not since humans first started sending spacecraft into the solar system has a comparable mission been seen