Alan Stern's coffee cup. Stern is the principle investigator for NASA's New Horizons mission, which launched in 2006 en route to a historic 2015 Pluto flyby.

In this episode of the SpaceGeeks podcast, Dan Leone catches up with New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern days ahead of the historic Pluto flyby. The former NASA science boss explains what it’s like to fill in one of the last blank spaces on the map: the never-before-seen-up-close planet/dwarf planet/ice dwarf at the edge of the mysterious and enormous Kuiper belt.

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Dan Leone is the NASA reporter for SpaceNews, where he also covers other civilian-run U.S. government space programs and a growing number of entrepreneurial space companies. He joined SpaceNews in 2011.Dan earned a bachelor's degree in public communications...