At the Sydney IAU General Assembly (GA) the statutes were modified to remove the votes by individual members. Few noticed this at the time but the subsequent reaction by disenfranchised members led us to revise this position in Prague. The need to have a members’ vote on the status of Pluto was complicated by these changes and the drama behind the scene at the Prague GA where the planet definition was resolved is not well known despite the huge public impact of this GA. I will describe some of the activities of the executive and its working groups during this very exciting GA. The IAU structures served us well during this process but of course there were also many lessons learned.

This paper presents my own recollections of the difficult relations that existed between the IAU and a fraction of the public, especially in the USA, following the IAU decision to reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet at the 2006 General Assembly in Prague, and which ultimately led the IAU to organize the NameExoWorlds international contest to give public names to selected exoplanets and their host stars. In spite of the success of the International Year of Astronomy in 2009, the Pluto controversy continued, and its consequences climaxed during my term (2012-2015), as NASA’s New Horizons probe approached Pluto for a flyby just before the 2015 General Assembly in Honolulu. It was during this period that the IAU launched the NameExoWorlds contest, which also came to a conclusion in Honolulu after over half a million votes were cast from all over the world. While the inside story of how the contest was organized has appeared elsewhere, here I focus on the historical and sociological context that made Pluto such a sensitive issue, especially in the USA, explaining why this contest generated another controversy between the IAU and the New Horizons team. However, after the world-wide success of NameExoWorlds, the IAU and the New Horizons team eventually reached an agreement on finalizing the characterization and names of a number of newly discovered Pluto and Charon surface features (an on-going process), while a new edition of NameExoWorlds is in preparation for the IAU centennial in 2019.

New Horizons is a NASA mission to explore the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt. The spacecraft was launched on 19 January 2006 and will begin its encounter studies of Pluto in early 2015, culminating on 14 July 2015 with a close approach just 12,500 km from Pluto. The spacecraft carries panchromatic and color images, IR and UV mapping spectrometers, a radio science package, two in situ plasma instruments, and a dust counter. We describe the capabilities of this instrument suite and the spacecraft, the observations planned for Pluto and its system of satellites, and our plans for KBO flybys to take place late in the 2010s.