Nearing the end of a 9-and-a-half-year journey to the solar system's unexplored outer reaches, scientists are exited about the new images of Pluto being received by the New Horizons spacecraft.

Less than a week from the historic flyby of Pluto, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is sending back pictures that are showing images of the small planet with more clarity and definition than ever seen before.

Hall Weaver, a New Horizons project scientist says the images will only get better.

"It's just juicier and juicier, it's amazing. The science team is just drooling over these pictures. If you look at the new pictures now, it's already five to six times better resolution than what we've been able to get before" Weaver said in a mission update.

Weaver said the information retreived from this mission will "rewrite the book."

NASA's New Horizon's spacecraft is on track to fly within about 12,500 km of Pluto on July 14, despite a computer glitch over the weekend that threatened the important flyby of the unexplored planet.

The glitch was caused after ground controllers accidentally overloaded the spacecraft's primary computer, which was attempting to compress data to free up memory while simultaneously installing the operating sequence for the Pluto encounter on its flash drive.