A "porkchop plot" is used by aeronautical engineers to compute when a given spacecraft should be launched to intersect a particular planet or other destination in space at a specific time. It requires consideration of multiple factors including the time required for the mission, the consumption of fuel, and the depth and angle of orbit required to complete the tasks of the spacecraft at its arrival point. For reasons beyond my ken (no, I am in fact definitely NOT a rocket scientist), the shortest and most direct way to the destination is not necessarily the one which consumes the least fuel.
The plot is called a porkchop because the resulting graph is shaped, well, like a porkchop.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is the facility which does most of the brainwork for NASA in planning NASA's deep space missions. In planning a trajectory for one of the Voyager missions, JPL ran over 10,000 porkchop plots and finally settled on about 100 possibilities.
A major consideration in the planning was to insure that no planetary encounters occurred near Thanksgiving or Christmas. Perhaps the motivation for this restriction was so that members of the public could appreciate a planetary flyby without a major holiday competing for their attention. A far more likely reason is that the space agencies did not want hordes of employees having to come to work on December 25 voicing opinions concerning the ancestry or sexual habits of supervisors who would schedule a flyby on Christmas.
The photo is, of course, of Pluto, the smallest and outermost PLANET in our solar system, and was recently taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.
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