Mission to Pluto

Next month, if all goes according to plan, a spacecraft called New Horizons will be launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., riding on an Atlas V rocket.
In 2015, it will fly past Pluto, the only remaining known planet never to have received a visit from Earth.
And the spacecraft will not stop — over the next five years, it will wind its way through the Kuiper Belt, a vast band of rocky, icy asteroids, far beyond the known planets, that may tell us volumes about the solar system, even the origins of life on our planet.
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After launch, it will make a long, lonely dash across the solar system, with most of its systems turned off. That is partly to protect them from breakdown, partly to reduce the expense of having controllers on Earth monitoring them.
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In February 2007, according to the primary flight plan, the ship will swing past Jupiter, picking up speed as if Jupiter's gravity were a giant slingshot. Without this "gravity-assist" maneuver, the trip would be about five years longer.
The encounter with Pluto and its largest known moon, Charon, is expected in July 2015.
Pluto follows a long, lopsided elliptical orbit, so distant that it takes 248 Earth years to circle the Sun once. Even at its closest point — which it passed shortly after Stern began his quest — it is 3 billion miles away.
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Pluto is only 1,430 miles in diameter, considerably smaller than the Earth's moon, and Charon is half its size. It is probably a dark, rocky, icy sphere where sunlight is only about a 1,000th as bright as it is on Earth. It appears to have a thin atmosphere, but it is so far from the Sun that as it moves away from the low point in its orbit, scientists believe the atmosphere freezes.
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The probe itself weighs about 1,000 pounds on Earth. If it could land on Pluto, it would weigh only about 67 pounds. But it is not designed to land; its five instruments will be very busy as they scan Pluto and Charon and the ship moves on at 30,000 mph.
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[ABC News | NASA]