Our first-ever close-up look at Pluto is still six months away, but this week marks the official kickoff of observations for NASA's New Horizons mission and sets the stage for a steady drumbeat of revelations about a little-known planetary frontier.

"It won't be much to write home about at the beginning here," project scientist Hal Weaver told NBC News from the mission's headquarters at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. "But it'll be neat to watch the Pluto system expand as we get closer and closer."

New Horizons was launched from Cape Canaveral nine years ago and during that time, the piano-sized spacecraft has traveled nearly 3 billion miles (4.8 billion kilometers) at the fastest clip ever recorded for an interplanetary probe. Also during that time, the International Astronomical Union put Pluto in a new pigeonhole reserved for "dwarf planets."

The $728 million mission is the first to study any of the icy dwarfs on the edge of the solar system's edge, and arguably the last one in the foreseeable future to visit a previously unexplored planetary realm. New Horizons' closest precedent is NASA's twin Voyager missions, which gave scientists their first up-close look at Uranus and Neptune.

"The last time anybody did anything like this was in 1989, with Voyager," said Alan Stern, a planetary scientist from the Southwest Research Institute who leads the New Horizons mission as principal investigator. "If you weren't at least 6 years old in 1989, you probably don't remember Voyager. So it turns out that about half the country has no recollection of a first-time planetary encounter like this."

Thursday marks T-minus-180 days on the countdown to the close encounter with Pluto on July 14, and the official start of the observational campaign for the approach.

New Horizons is still more than 133 million miles (215 million kilometers) away, and Pluto still looks like a mere speck. Nevertheless, the mission team plans to start using the spacecraft's pictures of Pluto to guide the spacecraft rather than relying on radio tracking.

The spacecraft was roused from hibernation on Dec. 6, and since then the team has been checking out its systems and the seven scientific instruments on board. The parameters for one of those instruments, the Alice ultraviolet imaging spectrometer, had to be tweaked to adjust for a slower-than-expected warmup, but those adjustments were completed on Tuesday.

"Everything looks like it's working great," Weaver said.

The New Horizons spacecraft is equipped with seven scientific instruments, including two spectrometers named Alice and Ralph (as a tribute to the characters played by Audrey Meadows and Jackie Gleason on "The Honeymooners"). The craft's plutonium-powered radioisotope thermoelectric generator sticks out at right.

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