NASA scientists on the news talk as if it’s Star Trek: the first mission to a new planet in an exploratory spacecraft and the greatest distance ever flown – nearly 3 billion miles from earth. Their voyage to Pluto culminates on July 14, 2015 as the New Horizons craft reports on its closest encounter with Pluto.

The mission began in 2001 when it was approved, and surged on January 19, 2006 as New Horizons lifted off from Cape Canaveral on its long journey. Of course, within months, scientists had officially demoted Pluto to the status of a dwarf planet, but I guess astrologers already knew why Pluto has an ironic sense of humor.

What’s happening with the horoscope of Pluto as scientists learn more about it? Pluto was discovered on February 18, 1930 at approximately 4:00 PM in Flagstaff, Arizona (documented time, rated A on Astrodatabank).

As the news stories multiply, transiting Jupiter in Leo trines the discovery chart’s Midheaven and transiting Uranus stations a few degrees from it. Everybody’s suddenly excited about Pluto, and its reputation is getting a boost.

The discovery chart has the Sun in Aquarius conjunct Venus in Pisces, both part of a T-square with oppositions to Neptune and squares to Jupiter. It looks like this oddball little planet is just often misunderstood.

Transiting Saturn in Scorpio stations in close square to the discovery chart’s Sun at the time of New Horizons’ closest approach, and quickly activates all the planets in the T-square. NASA is looking deeper at Pluto, but in a reductive manner, and may devalue it further. As they take time to analyze the spacecraft’s data, transiting Pluto will oppose the discovery chart’s natal Pluto in 2016, so our understanding of Pluto could still be transformed. The combined influence of hard-core Saturn in Scorpio and Pluto in Capricorn should make the take-way some pragmatic facts.

I first saw the Pluto discovery horoscope in Noel Tyl’s How to Personalize the Outer Planets. The late Jeff Jawer wrote a fascinating article about the discoveries of the outer planets in this book, noting that all of them have the Moon in Scorpio along with hard Saturn aspects! It’s well worth a read (though Jawer used a different time for Pluto’s discovery and gave no information as to its source).