NASA has reportedly snapped the clearest image of Pluto ever obtained.

According to NASA researchers, the space agency has snap the first ever color photo of the solar system’s smallest planet. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is currently traveling to rendezvous with the dwarf planet later this year.

The mission is aimed at understanding the solar system’s outer planets and could provide astronomers with a better understanding of how the planets formed over the course of the last several billion years.

The mission is already yielding a number of studying results, including the fact that Charon is far different from its host planet Pluto. The small moon, which orbits the outer planet, is providing scientists with a better understanding of how the two bodies interact with one another and could provide a picture of how planets beyond the Kuiper Belt are formed.

NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto has already returned a stunning amount of data already. The $700 million mission is the most automated and technologically advanced spacecraft launched by NASA in the last several years. The aim of the mission is to better understand the geology and the characteristics of solar systems outer planets, but also pave the way to produce better spacecraft for more advance space traveling, including trips to Europa and Mars.

Images and information sent by the spacecraft will take nearly 4.5 hours to reach Earth, despite traveling at the speed of light, according to NASA. As a result the space agency has to plan a number of the procedures run by the spacecraft ahead of time. Most of the technology and the mission is already scripted into the spacecraft’s database and will be run without any direction from Earth.