 It's not totally vintage but it is totally awesome. Today on Vintage Space we are looking at the New Horizons mission to Pluto. So this is a current mission that actually hasn't reached its target planet yet but it does have some really interesting intersections with vintage space history. We actually know very little about the solar system outside of Saturn and that's because we've only visited Uranus and Neptune with one probe once in the 1980s. The twin Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 on trajectories that would take them through the Jovian and Saturnian systems. However there was an option for Voyager 2 to continue on past Saturn and actually visit Uranus and Neptune on its way out of the solar system. Luckily Voyager 1 hit all of its targets in the Saturnian system and Voyager 2 was able to take this alternate trajectory to visit the ice giants Uranus and Neptune. But we haven't done a dedicated mission past Saturn since and really you could barely consider Voyager 2 a dedicated mission to the ice giants until now. We are about three months away from our closest ever encounter and the first dedicated mission to visit the dwarf planet Pluto. The New Horizons mission has its roots in a 2003 National Academy of Sciences panel designed to help NASA further its vision for planetary science. One of the items that came out of the so-called Decadal Survey was a push to explore the outer reaches of the solar system namely Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. The New Horizons mission fit the bill. After its close encounter with Pluto it does have the option of continuing on a trajectory to visit at least two more Kuiper Belt objects and he knows what might happen if the mission is extended and all the systems continue to work pretty well. The mission's main objective is to figure out more details on the relationship between Pluto and its largest moon, Caren. We're also characterizing the global geology and morphology of the planet, mapping both bodies' surface compositions and characterizing the neutral atmosphere of Pluto and its escape rate. But the other thing that's really interesting about New Horizons is it is going to give us the first ever up close images of Pluto. Because we've never had a dedicated mission to the dwarf planet all of the images we have mainly come from the Hubble Space Telescope or else ground-based observations. In those images Pluto looks like a point of light with other points of light around it being its moons and sometimes the color images look like a fuzzy brown ball. With New Horizons we're going to be able to resolve Pluto's surface in stunning detail compared to what we've seen and that is really exciting. And it's about the time we got there. When New Horizons launched in January 2006 it was the fastest ever moving object to leave the planet. It reached the moon in nine hours and Jupiter in a whopping 13 months. Usually it takes about seven years. We're just approaching Pluto now after almost ten years in space. And it's worth noting that we are neither landing on nor going into orbit around the dwarf planet. New Horizons is strictly a fly by mission with the closest approach coming on July 14th this summer. So New Horizons isn't exactly vintage but it is history in the making and that is pretty fun. So what do you guys think? Are you excited to see what we learned about Pluto during New Horizons' close encounter this summer? I know I am because I'm actually going to be in Maryland at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University bringing you guys all the information about the mission from the ground floor and I'm super excited about it. So be sure to follow the channel for updates this summer. In the meantime, be sure to leave questions, comments below and ideas you have for future episodes, things you've always wondered about about space and just don't have an answer for. And of course, be sure to follow me on Twitter as AST Vintage Space for constant spacey updates and with new episodes going up every Tuesday and Friday. Subscribe right here so you never miss an episode.