SPACE.com -- Pushing Ahead to Pluto: Faster Route Found

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	Pushing Ahead to Pluto: Faster Route Found By Leonard David Senior Space Writer posted: 04:25 pm ET 21 February 2002

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BOULDER, COLORADO -- Engineering and science teams are pressing ahead on the New Horizons mission to Pluto, still facing a NASA fiscal year 2003 budget edict that may kill their work.

While debate about a go/no go for the project is expected in the halls of the U.S. Congress, already allocated funds are being spent to design the New Horizons Pluto spacecraft and plot out its long-distance trek.

New Horizons mission planners have put together a way to trim nearly a year off their original Pluto arrival time of 2016.

Sprint the distance

If approved and funded later this year, the Pluto-Kuiper Belt (PKB) craft would launch in 2006, slip by Jupiter for a gravity boost while taking science data in 2007, and reach Pluto as early as 2015.

The probe can sprint the 3 billion miles from Earth to Pluto faster than previously thought, said Robert Farquhar, New Horizons mission director at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The quicker arrival time came as the mission and launch windows were analyzed in detail, he said.

New Horizons principal investigator, Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute here, said the faster trip time of nine-and-a-half years for the PKB mission to reach Pluto serves up several pluses.

For one, getting to the planet earlier means the probe can see more of Pluto's surface, due to better sunlight conditions. Also, the distant world's atmosphere will be another year away from freezing onto its surface. Additionally, a shorter cruise time reduces costs associated with flight operations. Lastly, arriving at Pluto in 2015 means more fuel available to dive into the Kuiper Belt after exploring the Pluto-Charon system.

Charon is a moon of distant Pluto.

Ballistic bonuses

Stern told SPACE.com that other ballistic bonuses have shown up in designing the spacecraft and shaping the outward bound trajectory.

"As part of an intense design phase, we found a number of things that are going to improve the mission," Stern said. Thanks to the march of technology, better spacecraft memory chips will permit more science data to be taken, and allow for increased memory redundancy.

"For the same price, you can get chips that have four times the packing density. It's just like computers. You never know when to buy because next year is always better," Stern said.

In other good news, the team has fine-tooth-combed the project's total cost, pegged at $488 million. By doing so, extra "rainy day dollars" -- reserve money to help solve any development problems that crop up -- have been found. Several million additional dollars of reserve money have now been identified, Stern said.

"My job is to get the United States to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. We are a full-blown project. The Congress directed us to do this and we're taking it as seriously as we know how," Stern said.