Their plans were unveiled by its Chairman of the Board, Gerry Griffin, and its President and CEO, Dr. Alan Stern.

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Alan Stern, who's the lead scientist on this mission, says there are bound to be other surprises in store regarding the ninth planet from the sun.

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"We're finding more and more, so our concern about hazards is going up, " New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

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From the scientific perspective, for the story to close for science, flight rates have to be high, said Alan Stern, chair of the scientific organizing committee for the conference and associate vice president of the Southwest Research Institute's Space Science and Engineering Division in Boulder.

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Alan Stern expects that after the Pluto flyby in 2015 or so, there will be plenty of power left, both electricity from the plutonium generator and fuel, so New Horizons will keep on going to explore other Plutolike objects in this region of the solar system which is known as the Kuiper Belt.

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Mr. ALAN STERN (Southwest Research Institute): And, you know, whereas we know of four terrestrial planets and four gas giants, we expect that there are hundreds if not thousands of these ice dwarfs, and so this class of planets which we have not yet reconnoitered is in reality the most populous class of planetary body in our solar system.

NPR: NASA Sends Spacecraft to Pluto

The obvious candidates include Alan Milburn, a former close associate of Gordon Brown's, whose stern-faced defence of the government's health policies has earned brownie points.

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