WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Fans of planet Pluto are headed for Capitol Hill, where they plan to deliver thousands of letters on Wednesday asking Congress for more money so a stalled mission to the distant space rock can go forward.
Representatives of the Planetary Society, a Pasadena, California group that favors solar system exploration, were expected to hand-carry a total of about 10,000 letters to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican and Sen. Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican.
Rohrabacher chairs the House Space and Aeronautics subcommittee and Frist is chairman of the Senate Science, Technology and Space subcommittee.
The campaign to reinvigorate the robotic Pluto-Kuiper Express mission has been gathering force since NASA stopped work on the project last month.
Originally scheduled for launch in 2004 with a projected arrival at Pluto in 2012, the project is now on hold while scientists affiliated with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) come up with a new design that would be cheaper than the estimated cost of over $500 million, a $150 million increase from estimates a year ago.
But Pluto proponents contend time is of the essence, and a delayed launch and arrival could get to the planet too late to observe its atmosphere, which is expected to freeze within a couple decades or so.
"Pluto is the beginning of the frontier...American must not lose the opportunity to reach for this frontier, Pluto, the last planet in the solar system and thrust beyond it to the icy objects that hold the building blocks of the solar system in deep freeze,'' astronomer Mike Drake of the University of Arizona said in a statement supporting the project.
Pluto the unexplored planet
Pluto is the only planet that has not been explored by earthly spacecraft, and that may be one reason for the fascination with it, according to Planetary Society associate director Charlene Anderson.
"It's the littlest and the farthest out,'' Anderson said by telephone, trying to explain why some humans are drawn to Pluto. "And then it's the only one we haven't been to. We don't want to leave the job undone.''
NASA spokesman Don Savage said the stop-work order imposed in September still stands, but that the mission will occur at some point in the future.
"We are also interested in completing the reconnaissance of the solar system,'' Savage said in a telephone interview. "We do intend to get there. It may not be as soon as originally planned, but the mission is definitely not canceled.''
But Anderson said that the question of when the atmosphere will freeze is critical, and no one knows for sure. "By delaying it even a few years, we're taking a chance,'' she said.
As the most distant planet from the Sun, Pluto takes 248 years to make one solar orbit. It was only discovered in 1930, so scientists have never observed its winter and do not know exactly what to expect.
Pluto came closest to the Sun in 1989 and has been moving away ever since. Even at its closest, it is still 30 times Earth's distance from the Sun, or about 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion kilometers).
As the amount of sunlight that reaches Pluto decreases, temperatures will drop until at some point the atmosphere will freeze, showing up as snow on the planet's surface, leaving only a trace of atmosphere.
Since a planet's atmosphere can help scientists find out how it formed, this could be important. Astronomers have already inspected the atmosphere of all the other planets orbiting the Sun.
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