Summary: Take a look through any book on our Solar System, and you'll see beautiful photographs of every planet - except one. Eight of our nine planets have been visited up close by a spacecraft, and we've got the breathtaking photos to prove it. Pluto's the last holdout, revealing just a few fuzzy pixels in even the most powerful ground and space-based telescopes. But with the launch of New Horizons in January, bound to arrive at Pluto in 9 years, we're one step closer to completing our planetary collection - and answering some big scientific questions about the nature of objects in the Kuiper Belt. Alan Stern is the Executive Director of the Space Science and Engineering Division, at the Southwest Research Institute. He's New Horizon's Principal Investigator.
