Packed safely in a pressurized shipping container, the New Horizons spacecraft is loaded onto a flatbed truck at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt , Md. , on Sept. 23 for the trip to Andrews Air Force Base, where it was loaded onto a C-17 cargo plane and flown to Kennedy Space Center , Fla. The Pluto-bound probe recently completed three months of space-environment tests at Goddard; before then it was tested at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md., where it was designed and built. New Horizons arrived at Kennedy Space Center in the early hours of Sept. 24 and is now being prepared for its scheduled January 2006 launch.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

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