Fasten your seat belts, space cadets: We're officially in the final countdown to NASA's 3-billion-mile journey to Pluto.

Pluto was actually still a planet when the space agency launched the mission in early 2006. (In case you've been living in a crater for the past nine years, Pluto was unceremoniously demoted due to its size that same summer. It's now considered a "dwarf planet" — which I'm assured by our HR department is a perfectly acceptable term to use — or a "plutoid," if you're feeling politically correct.)

Today, the agency's unmanned New Horizons spacecraft is in a galaxy far, far away — or, at least, at the edge of our solar system. Earlier this morning it brushed up against the former planet's private space, coming within 8,000 miles of the dwarf — err, plutoid. While we won't get the full scope of NASA's findings for a while, details about the enigmatic Pluto are slowly but surely trickling in.

Behold: seven titillating tidbits we just learned about everyone's favorite dwarf planet.

1. It may be a dwarf, but Pluto measures up better than we thought