Probe to Pluto set for launch - Lift off at 1:24 PM EST (1824 GMT) today

Published: Jan 17, 2006
Source: www.space.com



The first spacecraft ever aimed at the planet Pluto is hours away from launching into space on a nine-year mission to the distant, icy world.

A Lockheed Martin-built Atlas 5 rocket is poised to launch NASA’s Pluto-bound probe New Horizons at 1:24 p.m. EST (1824 GMT) today from Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida. If successful, today’s space shot will begin a more than nine-year trek to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt for the piano-sized spacecraft.

“This is a very exciting time,” said Dale Cruikshank, a New Horizons science team collaborator with NASA’s Ames Research Center, during Jan. 15 preflight briefing. “We are poised to begin the exploration of a new world, a world we didn’t even know that existed until 1930.”

Discovered by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh at Flagstaff Arizona’s Lowell Observatory in 1930, Pluto is the only planet ever found by a U.S. citizen as well as the only one found in the 20th Century, NASA officials said.

NASA's LIVE webcast of New Horizons' launch begins at 11:00 a.m. EST.
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