Last month, NASA launched the New Horizons space probe on a 9.5 year, 4.92 billion mile voyage to explore Pluto, its moon, Charon, and the Kuiper Belt (a ring of more than 100,000 small planetoids circling the sun at roughly the same distance as Pluto). Launching in January let NASA take advantage of a close flyby of Jupiter to slingshot the craft toward its destination and shave three to five years off the travel time. So expect to hear, and see, a lot more about Pluto in early summer of 2015.
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