Scientists may no longer consider Pluto a planet, but it remained the last unexplored world of our solar system until Tuesday, when the fastest spacecraft to ever leave Earth reached its elusive goal. New Horizons launched January 19, 2006, hurtling through space at about 34,000 miles per hour. The spacecraft has traveled 3 billion miles on its way to Pluto, which shows how far space exploration has come: The first missions to photograph planets from space traveled just 65 and 6,118 miles to capture Earth and Mars. Here are the first photos taken of every planet in our solar system.

New Horizons supplied this image taken 476,000 miles from Pluto. On Tuesday, the spacecraft came within just 7,750 miles of Pluto’s surface.

The first image from space came long before Sputnik, Neil Armstrong, and missions named Apollo. On October 24, 1946, a crew of soldiers and scientists strapped a 35-millimeter camera to a V-2 missile and launched it 65 miles above the Earth’s surface. The team had protected the film in steel casing, and when 19-year-old soldier Fred Rulli found the mangled remains of the rocket, the team celebrated the first images of Earth from space.

On July 14, 1965, exactly 50 years before New Horizons provided the first images of Pluto, Mariner 4 became the first spacecraft to photograph a planet other than Earth. The barren images dispelled any lingering scientific theories of modern life on Mars. Mariner 4 photographed and transmitted images of more than 500,000 square miles of Mars’s surface.

Mariner 10 launched on November 3, 1973 on a mission to research the atmosphere and solar winds on Earth’s neighbor. After some trajectory issues, Mariner 10 passed within 3,584 miles of Venus, and used ultraviolet filters to capture the complexity of Venus’s clouds.