One sign that the New Horizons spacecraft is getting close to the distant planet of Pluto is the growing size of Will Grundy’s hotel room bill.
Grundy, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory, is leader of New Horizons’ surface composition team. With just weeks to go until the spacecraft makes its closest pass of the dwarf planet, Grundy and the rest of the mission team are setting up camp at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.