space probes to Ceres + Pluto

I don't remember ever seeing this series "Men into Space" even though I am big fan of The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits and grew up on those shows. It almost seems like I remember one of those McCauley space helmets. But what I wanted to say that people on this board might find interesting, is, in the movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still", Klaatu says he came from 250 million miles. Well, that's not very far in outer space terms, but I discovered that if Klaatu had been from the asteroid belt that takes up the space between Mars' orbit and Jupiter's, then 250 million miles might be accurate. Well, it turns out there is one of these what-are-now-referred-to-as Dwarf Planets (you may remember that Pluto was recently demoted to the status of "dwarf planet") in the asteroid belt and that is this one named "Ceres". Trouble is, it is quite small, with a diameter of about 600 miles (and the surface area of Ceres I discovered is about the same as the country of Argentina). So its unlikely Klaatu came from there, unless he lived in some self-contained community out-post of something that had been constructed there. But while reading about this on Wikipedia, I learned that 1) there is a NASA mission (launched in 2007) to rendezvous a space probe with Ceres in 2015 called Dawn (the current best photo of it is very indistinct) and 2) another NASA space probe had passed it by, and this one was launched in 2006 on a mission to Pluto. That mission is called "New Horizons". The Dawn mission is amazing enough, since the plan is to have it first orbit a smaller (but the 2nd most massive after Ceres) asteroid named "Vesta" and then orbit this dwarf planet Ceres. But the New Horizons spacecraft, I discovered, had the distinction of having "left Earth at the fastest launch speed ever recorded for a man-made object". Now who wants to guess how long it would have taken the New Horizons spacecraft to reach the Moon if it had aimed for it. Well, to quote the Wikipedia article: "New Horizons took only nine hours to reach the Moon's orbit, passing lunar orbit before midnight EST that day." 9 hours to get to the Moon?

Ceres - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)
Dawn - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_Mission
New Horizons - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons