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Funny, I always thought that part of Doctor King’s dream was the coming of a day when nobody would notice the color of anybody’s skin, a day when their accomplishments would speak for themselves.

NASA scrubbed the launch of the New Horizons mission to Pluto today due to high winds at the launch pad. Winds were gusting to more than 33 knots which NASA determined to be a "no go." They will try again tommorrow at approximately the same time.

The launch is scheduled from Cape Canaveral, FL at 1:14pm Eastern. NASA's New Horizon SiteSpaceflightnow.com Mission StatusNASA TV links

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - An unmanned NASA spacecraft the size of a piano is set to lift off Tuesday on a nine-year journey to Pluto, the last unexplored planet in the solar system. Scientists hope to learn more about the icy planet and its large moon, Charon, as well as two other, recently discovered moons in orbit around Pluto. The $700 million New Horizons mission also will study the surrounding Kuiper Belt, the mysterious zone of the solar system that is believed to hold thousands of comets and other icy objects. It could hold clues to how the planets were...

CAPE CANAVERAL -- It will be the fastest spacecraft ever launched, zooming past the moon in nine hours and reaching Jupiter in just over a year at a speed nearly 100 times that of a jetliner. Its target is Pluto -- the solar system's last unexplored planet, 3 billion miles from Earth. And the New Horizons spacecraft, set for liftoff on Tuesday, could reach it within nine years. Pluto, a tiny, icy misfit of a planet -- some say it's not a planet at all -- neither resembles the rocky bodies of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, nor the giant...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - It will be the fastest spacecraft ever launched, zooming past the moon in nine hours and reaching Jupiter in just over a year at a speed nearly 100 times that of a jetliner. Its target is Pluto — the solar system's last unexplored planet, 3 billion miles from Earth. And the New Horizons spacecraft, set for liftoff on Tuesday, could reach it within nine years. Pluto, a tiny, icy misfit of a planet — some say it's not a planet at all — neither resembles the rocky bodies of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, nor the...

Something spectacular may happen in 2012. New Horizons, a NASA space craft with a probe will travel at 26,700mph over four billion miles to Pluto. It will be in close proximity of Pluto by 2012. New Horizons probe will travel faster than any previous spacecraft on its journey to the planet farthest from the Sun, its moon Charon and the mysterious, icy Kuiper Belt. Relatively little is known about the ninth planet Pluto. It is an unknown zone of the solar system. Many scientists have started believing that Pluto will surprise all in the earth by 2012. There are fair...

Protest Planned for Pluto Spacecraft The Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space of Brunswick, Maine has called for a demonstration at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Jan. 7 from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm EST (1600-1800 GMT). The protest will highlight opposition to NASA’s planned New Horizons launch on January 17 that will carry a cache of plutonium to power the Pluto-bound probe’s radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG). To be launched by an Atlas 5 booster, New Horizons will head out on a long distance journey to shoot past Pluto in 2015. After that flyby,...

One leading proposal would define a planet as any object whose diameter exceeds 2,000 kilometers and that is round as a result of gravity, criteria that would encompass anything Pluto-size or larger, including Xena. But that doesn't sit well with some astronomers, who are irked that the scrawny iceball with the cockeyed orbit earned membership into the club in the first place. "Pluto is an impostor," says Harvard astronomer Brian Marsden, a member of the IAU committee. "The simplest thing is to get rid of it and say we've got eight."

"The Kuiper Belt is the largest structure in our planetary system and the home of the Pluto system, as well as myriad other miniature worlds that orbit in a deep freeze far beyond Neptune, the most distant of the giant planets. Its discovery has revolutionized our understanding of the architecture of our home solar system and forced us to confront the jarring, but exciting new fact that miniature planets like Pluto are more numerous than the conventional ones like Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and the giant planets." ...Pending final approval, the spacecraft will launch from Kennedy Space Center in January...

I have been working on seeing the United States fly a mission to Pluto since early in 1988. After a few weeks of discussions with colleagues and a little scheming and ritual screwing up of a 31-year-old's courage, my first meeting with NASA officials on this was held on May 8, 1988, in the office of Geoff Briggs. Dr. Briggs was NASA's Director of Planetary Exploration at that time. In that meeting I asked Geoff, "With Voyager about to arrive at Neptune, why isn't NASA even planning a mission to Pluto?" His deceptively simple response lulled me into a false...

BALTIMORE - Pluto has three moons, not one, new images from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest. Pluto, discovered as the ninth planet in 1930, was thought to be alone until its moon Charon was spotted in 1978. The new moons, more than twice as far away as Charon and many times fainter, were spotted by Hubble in May. While the observations have to be confirmed, members of the team that discovered the satellites said Monday they felt confident about their data. "Pluto and Charon are not alone, they have two neighbors," said Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins University Applied...

Scientists are over the moon at the W.M. Keck Observatory and the California Institute of Technology over a new discovery of a satellite orbiting the Solar System's 10th planet (2003 UB313). The newly discovered moon orbits the farthest object ever seen in the Solar System. The existence of the moon will help astronomers resolve the question of whether 2003 UB313, temporarily nicknamed "Xena," is more massive than Pluto and hence the 10th planet. A paper describing the discovery was submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters on October 3, 2005. "We were surprised because this is a completely different type of...

PASADENA, Calif. - Between feedings and diaper changes of his newborn daughter, Michael E. Brown may yet find an 11th planet. Once conducted almost exclusively on cold, lonely nights, observational astronomy these days is often done under bright California sunshine. When he has a few spare minutes, Dr. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, downloads images taken during a previous night by a robotically driven telescope at Palomar Observatory 100 miles away. Each night, the telescope scans a different swath of sky, photographing each patch three times, spaced an hour and a half apart....

Astronomers have found a large object in the Solar System's outer reaches. It is being hailed as "a great discovery". Details of the object are still sketchy. It never comes closer to the Sun than Neptune and spends most of its time much further out than Pluto. It is one of the largest objects ever found in the outer Solar System and is almost certainly made of ice and rock. It is at least 1,500km (930 miles) across and may be larger than Pluto, which is 2,274km (1,400 miles) across. The uncertainty in estimates of its size is due to...

Front Page > Science & Space Pluto Mission Takes Aim at Last Unvisited PlanetBrian HandwerkNational Geographic News February 15, 2005 Amateur astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto 75 years ago this week. The last planet found in our solar system remains the only one never visited by an Earth probe—but NASA's New Horizons mission hopes that distinction won't last much longer. "We're planning on a launch in January of 2006," said program executive Kurt Lindstrom from NASA's Washington, D.C., headquarters. "This year we are assembling [the spacecraft] and beginning testing." If the mission launches on time, the craft would reach...

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — It's been 75 years since the discovery of the planet Pluto, but it remains a mystery. Perhaps in 10 more years, when a space probe gets close enough for a good look, some of its secrets will be revealed. Pluto was heralded as the ninth planet in the solar system when it was spotted Feb. 18, 1930, by Clyde Tombaugh, a young amateur astronomer at Lowell Observatory. It still holds that title — planet — today, if somewhat tenuously. "It's a misbehaved planet, if you want to think about it as a planet," said Neil deGrasse...

Probe to 'look inside' asteroids By Paul Rincon BBC News Online science staff in Paris, France Studies of asteroids would aid Earth-protection strategies A new space mission concept unveiled at a Paris conference aims to look inside asteroids to reveal how they are made. Deep Interior would use radar to probe the origin and evolution of two near-Earth objects less than 1km across. The mission, which could launch some time later this decade, would also give clues to how the planets evolved. The perceived threat of asteroids colliding with our planet has renewed interest in space missions to understand these...

Reworked images reveal hot Venus By Dr David Whitehouse Mars it is not: Reprocessed Venus image As the world looks at Mars, an American scientist has produced the best images ever obtained from the surface of a rather different planet - Venus. The second planet from the Sun is blanketed with a thick layer of cloud. Computer researcher Don Mitchell used original digital data from two Soviet Venera probes that landed in 1975. His reprocessed and recalibrated images provide a much clearer view of the Venusian surface which is hotter even than the inside of a household oven. Original digital...

Oh My! What choreography! Pee-ew. Anti-war Protesters flash peace signs as they peform yoga in downtown San Francisco on Friday, March 19, 2004. Demonstrations in several U.S. cities are taking place Friday on the anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) This one is just plain scary!