A mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt of rocks and ice beyond the planet could be ready to launch as early as December 2004, a team chosen by NASA to study the feasibility of such a mission announced Friday.
The New Horizons team, one of two teams investigating the Pluto/Kuiper missions, consists of scientists and engineers from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
The team proposes to give the spacecraft a gravitational boost from Jupiter, which would minimize flight time and allow NASA to launch the craft with a smaller vehicle. The mission would also be assembled from subsystems designed for previous planetary missions, thus reducing its cost and the risk of technical problems while speeding development.
NASA will now review the plans and decide which, if any, it intends to move ahead with.
"Im very happy with the results," says Alan Stern of SwRI, the principal investigator of the New Horizons study and proposal. "We have a very solid concept thats now been proven in a great degree of engineering detail."
The craft would be outfitted with miniaturized cameras, a radio science instrument, ultraviolet and infrared spectrometers, and space plasma experiments. The study found that this complement of equipment should be well suited to meet NASAs mission goals: to characterize the global geology and makeup of Pluto and its companion, Charon, map their surface compositions, and characterize Plutos atmosphere and atmospheric escape rate.
Last December, after scrapping the Pluto-Kuiper Express mission due to rising costs, NASA announced an open competition for new and lower-cost ways to get to Pluto, in the first phase of its Pluto-Kuiper Belt (PKB) mission.
In June, the space agency gave New Horizons and another team from the University of Colorado, $450,000 each to conduct a three-month concept study of the PKB. The Colorado teamed called their proposal the Pluto and Outer Solar System Explorer (POSSE).
These "Phase A" studies, due on September 25th, were intended to determine if either plan could meet NASAs scientific requirements for the mission at or beneath a $500 million budget cap the agency placed.
However, Congress has yet to approve funding for any Pluto mission and the SwRI must launch by early 2006 to take advantage of Jupiters gravity. Nevertheless, NASA is supposed to visit each project site next month to meet with the science and engineering teams.
Pluto is the most distant planet from the sun and the largest member of the Kuiper Belt-a collection of rocks left over after the other planets formed-as well as the only planet yet to be visited by a probe from Earth. During its 200-year-long winter, Pluto becomes so cold its atmosphere freezes solid. In that state the planets atmosphere might be nearly impossible to study. Scientists hope to complete the mission before this lengthy freeze sets in.
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