I like many here find these space probes endlessly fascinating, for several reasons. Of course there's the discovery aspect but what really intrigues me are the

I like many here find these space probes endlessly fascinating, for several reasons. Of course there's the discovery aspect but what really intrigues me are the engineering challenges and discovering things are huge problems that I never thought of as being problems. It's an incredible feat to have something like this operate for decades (in the case of Voyager and Pioneer) from both a hardware and software perspective. But as for eye-opening problems, two examples spring to mind. Firstly, they don't know exactly where Pluto is. It was only discovered in 1930 and given it has an orbital period of 248 years, we haven't observed it complete even half an orbit yet. So it's visible to New Horizons but one thing they're not sure of is exactly how far away it is. This is important because in the next week they need to do a final course correction. More: http://www.nature.com/news/pluto-bound-probe-faces-its-toughest-task-finding-pluto-1.17811 http://www.nature.com/news/pluto-bound-probe-faces-its-tough... The second applies to the mission in planning phase to head back to Europa. I knew Jupiter had a strong magnetic field but I didn't realize quite how destructive it's radiation belts were and the source of them is actually Jupiter's magnetic field capturing radiation from the Sun. This is why the mission plans to do flybys rather than orbit Europa. I think those of us who are software engineers can appreciate this on typically a much smaller scale. Things often look much easier than they actually are until you delve into the details. It's amusing to me to see this apply on much grander scales too. So it's going to be exciting to images from the flyby of both Pluto and Charon. It's a shame the encounter will be so brief and the resolution of Pluto not super-high (IIRC down to 20km or so) but it'll be a lot more than we have now. It makes me wonder how complicated an intercept course would've or could be to really study Pluto. Given our missions to Jupiter and Saturn in the last 20 years I wonder if we'll see a return trip to Uranus or Neptune. I sure hope so.