>>two parts<br /><br />A battery powered smaller probe, released a few weeks ahead of encounter (like Huygens!) would be an awesome tool for getting a full map of the system. Just enough power to communicate back to the main craft, with well-chosen instrumentation our science return could increase by 30%, surely!<br /><br />Since Pluto/Charon orbit every... 6 days? ...that means the best pictures of at least part of the orbs will be taken from 7,000,000 miles away*. That seems nutty. I know there is alot more to science that returning images, sure, but suppose there is something fundamentally odd about the parts we don't see, that we need to understand to finish the story?<br /><br />A current example would be Iapetus' ridge. Voyager missed it. <br /><br />(*At opposition, Mars is about 35 million miles away. If you look at it through a moderately good 'scope, you can see the polar caps. New Horizons is unlikely to carry even that much resolving power, so even at 5x closer for those parts that will then rotate out of view, surface features will not be resolved).