Bad Astronomy

PlutoCam

UPDATE (Dec 14, 3:30 Pacific time): Coincidentally, NASA will be holding a press briefing Monday at 1:00 p.m. (Eastern) about New Horizons. It will be streamed on NASA TV.

A PlutoCam? Well, kinda.

The New Horizons mission will launch in January and head off to distant Pluto, which some people seem to think is a planet. Even if it isn’t, New Horizons is an incredible mission, and it’ll take more than 9 years to get there.

The spacecraft is currently sitting in a clean room at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. While it’s in final prep for launch, the folks down there have set up a webcam so you can see the progress on it! That’s cool. Well, mostly cool; when I looked this morning all I saw was this:

I’ll keep watching to see if any guys in those environmental bunny suits start crawling on it.

In the meantime, click on the image of the spacecraft above to peruse the gallery of drawings they have. Most were done by my old bud Dan Durda, a gifted scientist and artist.

Tip o’ the Bad Hat to Restiffbard for the link.