The launch was pushed back seven times before the plans for were finally ditched over safety concerns, after engineers struggled with gusty winds at Cape Canaveral air force station in Florida.
The initial delays included a failure of a valve in the rocket which later started working properly.
The probe is now due to be launched during a two hour window on from 1.16pm Wednesday local time (0516 Thursday AEST).
NASA has nearly four weeks to launch the probe but if it fails before February 3, the chances of mission failure are increased as an extra five years could be added to the flight time.
NASA is attempting to take advantage of an alignment which puts Pluto in a position that would allow the space agency to tap into the gravitational force of Jupiter to sling the spacecraft outward at accelerated speeds.
That will help cut about 30 months off the trip to Pluto, which the craft will approach between July 2015 and July 2017.
New insights
The New Horizons mission will endeavour to propel a grand piano sized spacecraft to Pluto, the outmost of the nine official planets of the solar system.
Flying at unparalleled speeds of up to 75 kilometres an hour, it is expected that the craft will take ten years to reach Pluto.
The $A927.75 million probe will explore Pluto and its large moon Charon, and will press on to explore other objects in the outer Solar System.
Scientists hope the ambitious journey will deliver new views and insights into our solar system, allowing them to better understand the origins of Earth and the other planets.
“What we know about Pluto today could fit on the back of a postage stamp,” said Colleen Hartman, NASA deputy associate administrator.
“The textbooks will be rewritten after this mission is completed.”
The mission’s chief scientist, Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute’s Department of Space Studies, compared the opportunity to a great archaeological dig.
Some astronomers say Pluto is not a true planet at all, and should be regarded as a small, icy object making up the region of space known as the Kuiper Belt.
The belt lying beyond Neptune, consists of tens of thousands of icy objects spread out between 30 and 50 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
Scientists hope that Pluto and Charon, and the millions of pieces of astral debris in the Kuiper belt and beyond, will reveal some o the secrets of the formation of the universe.