2015-01-14 科学新发现：重新发现冥王星-25（在线收听）

With such a short window to capture data, the team must test and retest the instruments throughout new horizons' nine-year journey.Every year for about two months we are going to wait the spacecraft up and do some testing, some observations of celestial objects and some commissioning testing of all the instruments to check them out, to make sure they are still performing and will be ready to go when we finally get to Pluto in July 2015.

Ready to answer some of science's most fundamental questions.

The delivery of organic material and water from the outer solar system to the inner solar system may have played a pivotal role in the formation of life on the earth.

It's just one of many questions about the solar system and its formation that scientists hope that new horizons will help answer, but above all when new horizons arrives, astronomers are expecting the unexpected.

I think the most exciting things we are going to learn from new horizons are all those things that never even occurred to us to ask, and suddenly you go there and you realise we didn't know anything.

One thing is certain, the arrival of new horizons will be the astronomical event of the 21st century.

It's a whole new kind of world, it's a planet i think everyone is trying to imagine, it's a frontier world, it's going to be the cover of the Rolling Stone.

And perhaps most fittingly the spacecraft carries the ashes of the man who started the journey to Pluto almost 80 years ago, Klair T, this is a journey to one of the solar system's most puzzling, most mystifying worlds, once the ninth planet, now a dwarf planet, an isolated oddity that became one of many.