Tuesday, December 06, 2005

To Pluto!

Next month, NASA hopes to launch one of the most historic space exploration missions it has ever mounted. The mission is called New Horizons.

The objectives of the New Horizons mission are to make the first reconnaissance of planet Pluto (the only unexplored planet) and its moons, and to then explore onward, into the vast, ancient, and icy disk of other bodies that Pluto orbits with on the frontier of our planetary system—the so-called Kuiper Belt. New Horizons represents almost 17 years of work by the scientific community to finally complete the reconnaissance of our planetary system.


Read the rest here and go to the New Horizons homepage to see even more. Too bad its named that though. After all the great new missions were named for scientists of note like Cassini or Galileo or evoked exploration ideas like Viking or Mariner or Voyager...instead we have a name that's rather bland. Too bad.



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