The stalwart, the circannual and the nascent: Martian rover Spirit and Saturn probe Cassini will be joined by the New Horizons craft in space later this afternoon when an Atlas V rocket brings it to low-Earth orbit, and joined in vocation nine years later when New Horizons travels thence to Pluto. It has been observed that with the first images of Pluto and its known moon Charon, the last uncharted heliocentric principal may be contemplated by man in terms more expository than two salient jots of light on a starfield. And there we have a paradox. The more familiar our little family rounding Sol, the more commonplace is each discovery, the splendor NASA shows us already less astounding than animated and fanciful sequences filmmakers build from composites of nature. Until, that is, we see Mars or Saturn or Pluto right there, there in front of us, through the larboard viewport.