This July 13, 2015, image provided by NASA shows Pluto from the New Horizons spacecraft. The United States is now the only nation to visit every single planet in the solar system. Pluto was No. 9 in the lineup when New Horizons departed Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Jan. 19, 2006.

As exciting as the event is for the astronomy world, the unprecedented number and quality of photos planned to be taken of Pluto Tuesday probably won’t help it recapture its lost planet-hood.

Clyde Tombaugh poses with this telescope, through which he discovered Pluto, at the Lowell Observatory on Observatory Hill in Flagstaff, Ariz.

But the historic fly-by by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will still be a very big deal for demoted little Pluto — and a point of pride for Jayhawk Nation.

“It’s going to put it back in the limelight,” said Kansas University physics and astronomy professor Bruce Twarog. “Assuming everything goes well, it’ll put it in the front pages of planetary science for probably the next year.”

In 1930 KU alumnus Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, which for decades was considered the ninth planet. However, Pluto was reclassified in 2006 from “classical” planet to “dwarf” planet (albeit the largest dwarf planet, Twarog noted).

Tombaugh, who earned astronomy degrees at KU in the 1930s, died in 1997, but he has literally been a part of the New Horizons mission: His ashes are in a container on the spacecraft that has been hurtling at more than 30,000 mph toward Pluto — about 3 billion miles from Earth — for the past nine and a half years.

Tiny and faraway as Pluto may be, it’s important to planetary science, Twarog said. People understandably get excited about the solar system’s biggest, brightest and most spectacular bodies.

“In reality, in the solar system, things like Pluto and objects smaller than Pluto are more common than things like Jupiter and Saturn,” he said. “So if they’re going to learn about the nature of the solar system, these are the things you want to study.”

Tuesday morning New Horizons will get “up close and personal” with Pluto, Twarog said, taking massive quantities of photos — from a mere 7,000 miles away — that will allow scientists to see it in a way never before possible.

“This,” Twarog said, “is going to basically revolutionize what we know about the planet overnight.”

Dwarf planet, that is.