Photo by Mehgan Murphy, courtesy National Zoo

Officials at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo say they are gearing up for the final 24 hours of watching to see if giant panda Mei Xiang might be pregnant again. Starting at 4 p.m. today, a group of more than 40 volunteers and staff will keep vigil to watch the panda around the clock, with the aide of a series of 38 cameras set up inside the giant panda habitat.

The online pandacam will also allow the public to join in the watch, and possibly even view a birth — that is, if Mei is even pregnant at all.

This year marks the eighth time the Zoo’s female panda has been artificially inseminated, and it only worked once, in 2005, when she gave birth to Tai Shan. Breeding pandas is a notoriously difficult business, and the odds are stacked against us that Mei Xiang might actually give birth this weekend.

Still, now that our beloved Butterstick is long gone to China, hopes for a new panda cub have reached a fevered pitch: In anticipation of so much more traffic to its pandacam, the Zoo plans to limit each view to five minutes per session over the weekend.

We’ll certainly be monitoring developments from the giant panda habitat closely over the weekend, with fingers tightly crossed for good news.