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Mission Overview: Why Go to Pluto ? Planetary exploration is a historic endeavor and a major focus of NASA. New Horizons is designed to help us understand worlds at the edge of our solar system by making the first reconnaissance of Pluto and Charon - a "double planet" and the last planet in our solar system to be visited by spacecraft. Then, as part of an extended mission, New Horizons would visit one or more objects in the Kuiper Belt region beyond Neptune.

""I think that when people see Pluto (during the New Horizons flyby), they're going to figure out what a lot of planetary scientists have already figured out," Stern said. "Is that the outer solar system is teeming with small planets ... (Pluto) is admittedly a new "species" of planet if you will." "It's as if we had traveled the world and only found large dogs like the Labrador and never found the Chihuahuas. Well, would we say they're not dogs just because there's too many of them and we can't keep track of their names and they are smaller?""

The New Horizons mission will help us understand worlds at the edge of our solar system by making the first reconnaissance of the dwarf planet Pluto and by venturing deeper into the distant, mysterious Kuiper Belt - a relic of solar system formation.

The New Horizons spacecraft, which launched in January of 2006, will get within 6,000 miles of Pluto on July 14, 2015.

This year will be another exciting one for space exploration. While 2014 will be remembered as the year we landed on a comet(!), 2015 may be known as the year of Pluto (and other dwarf planets). The New Horizons spacecraft begins its approach to Pluto this month, and will get closest to the dwarf planet in July, taking in the best view ever of the icy, remote world-possibly revealing a dramatic landscape with mountains, volcanoes, and geysers. In March, the Dawn spacecraft will arrive at Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres is another icy world, possibly with liquid water under a frozen surface, making it potentially habitable for life.

"tarting 35 years ago, our view of the solar system was forever changed. The launch of the Voyager 1 probe on Sept. 5, 1977 ushered in a golden era of planetary exploration. Along with its sister probe, Voyager 2, the spacecraft took the first detailed images of planets in the outer solar system, discovering magnificent rings, churning atmospheric processes, and volcanic activity on tiny moons. Voyager 2 actually launched on Aug. 20, slightly earlier than its counterpart, but took a longer route to reach Jupiter and Saturn after Voyager 1. The Voyager probes were a scaled-back version of a proposed "Grand Planetary Tour" mission, which would have used a rare alignment in the outer solar system to swing from planet to planet with minimal fuel. In the original plan, four spacecraft would have visited all the gas giants and even tiny Pluto (then still a planet). But without budgetary support from President Nixon and Congress, the ambitious mission was canceled. Since the 1977 planetary configuration occurred only once every 177 years, NASA engineers decided to go forward with a new plan - the Voyager probes, two identical robots that would travel to Jupiter and Saturn and, if successful, on to Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 ultimately performed a closer encounter with Saturn's moon Titan that flung it out of the solar system, and only Voyager 2 made it to the latter planets."

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live on the moon? What about Mars, or Venus or Mercury? We sure have and that's why we decided to find out what it might be like to live on other worlds in our solar system, from Mercury to Pluto and beyond in a new, weekly 12-part series.

For this series, written by Space.com contributor Joseph Castro, we wanted to know what the physical sensation of living on other worlds would be like: What would the gravity be like on Mercury; How long would your day be on Venus? What's the weather on Titan?

Rap Battle looking at what are the / how do we qualify something to be a planet