New Horizons

From the Washington Post today:
NASA Readies to Launch Pluto Mission:

“NASA is making final preparations to launch the fastest spaceship ever made on a 10-year odyssey to Pluto, the scarlet-colored ‘ice dwarf’ that shines brightly in the chill wilderness of deep space nearly 4 billion miles away.

“Pluto is the only planet that has never yet had a human-engineered visitor, but if all goes well, New Horizons, a piano-size spacecraft wrapped in thermal blankets, will spend five months in close flyby, taking pictures and gathering data on features such as the planet’s atmosphere, its surface geology and its temperature.

“‘We really expect the mission to be transformational,’ said New Horizons lead scientist Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado. ‘This is the capstone of the original visits to the planets. It takes us 4 billion miles away and 4 billion years back in time.’

“The $700 million mission is the first space expedition aimed specifically at a celestial body beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt, a remote region filled with debris from the creation of the solar system. Pluto is also the solar system’s only known ‘binary planet,’ orbiting the sun in tandem with a moon, Charon, that is more than half as big as Pluto itself. Two other tiny moons were discovered earlier this year.

“NASA plans to launch New Horizons from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida as early as possible during a 29-day window that opens at 1:24 p.m. on Jan. 17. If liftoff occurs during the first 11 days, the spacecraft will reach Pluto in the summer of 2015. Launching later will result in substantial delays; starting the voyage on Valentine's Day would mean arrival as late as 2020.…”