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There is more to come in our broadcast as Dr. Hal Weaver joins us in the studio to talk about his role

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in the New Horizons project and answer more questions from our viewers. At the end of the show,

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we'll give away prize packs to two of our question board participant winners.

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But first, Dr. Fran Bagenal, mission co-investigator from the University of Colorado,

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explains the science involved in getting New Horizons to the edge of our solar system.

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We want to know a lot about Pluto because we never really got a good view of what it looks like. Even with the best telescopes,

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even with the Hubble Space Telescope. It just looks like a fuzzy blob. So we are really in our exploration

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phase of trying to understand this planet and get our first glimpse of what the surface looks like, see whether there are craters, volcanoes,

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or frost, or cracks, or, you know, what does it look like? Pluto will be three billion miles away from Earth when we fly by.

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When we arrive at Pluto, or how long it will take to get to Pluto, will depend on when we launch. If we launch on the first day,

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January the 11th, then we'll get to Pluto in 2015. But if we launch a day later or several days later, we don't just get there one

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or two days later,it could be as much as five years later. And the reason for this is that it depends on whether or not we

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can get that gravity assist of Jupiter and it also depends on the orbits of the planets.

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So a little delay can lead to a much longer duration of the mission and a longer time getting to Pluto.

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One of the things that NASA wants to find out is whether or not Pluto has any more moons.

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Now, very recently we've discovered that there were two new moons discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope and so now we're thinking,

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are there more moons? Are there three, four, five, many?

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Or are there rings? Could little Pluto have little rings around it, just as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have rings?

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So NASA wants to do the basic exploration it does when it first goes to a planet which is to check it out, see what's there,

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and do an inventory of what we might want to go back later and do a more thorough study of.

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In order to get out to Pluto, it takes a long time to get there because it's a long way away.

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And so we can either use a really big booster, or we can take advantage of the planet Jupiter on the way.

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Jupiter is the biggest planet in the solar system, a lot of mass,

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and we can use that mass to get a little more speed and get us on and help us on our way to Pluto.

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What we won't be able to do as much as missions like Galileo that measured the moons around Jupiter, but we will

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be able to test our cameras by taking some pictures and use the other instruments to make measurements of the environment of Jupiter.

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One of the especially exciting things is to find out whether or not the moon Io, which has lots of volcanoes on it,

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has had some activity since it was last visited by Galileo. So we will be looking for changes such as any

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volcanic flows, things like that on the moon Io.

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The Kuiper Belt has been discovered fairly recently. The first object was discovered in the Kuiper Belt about 1992,

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so this is a, something like the Asteroid Belt but much, much further out.

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It's out beyond the orbit of Neptune and Pluto is the king of the Kuiper Belt.  It's the biggest object that we've found so far,

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though we think there may be other objects going to be as big as Pluto.

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And so right now, we think there are about a thousand objects spread between 30 and 50 times the

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distance between the Earth and the sun, and there could be many more.

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Many thanks to Fran for that fascinating presentation.

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