BOULDER, COLORADO -- The White House, Congress, and NASA will soon seal the fate of a mission to the most distant planet known within our family of worlds: Pluto and its moon, Charon, the only planet-satellite system in our solar system that has not been visited by an interplanetary probe.
An earlier Pluto spacecraft program was scrapped due to skyrocketing costs that forced NASA to cancel that effort in 2000. Last November, after a heated competition, NASA selected a new team for the job of getting to chilly Pluto.
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physical Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland and Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, Texas were tapped to push forward on the first mission to explore the last known planet in the solar system and the Kuiper Belt region beyond that faraway world.
The team also includes Ball Aerospace; Stanford University; NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; and other universities and research institutions.
Title for the winning proposal, with the mission pegged at a cost of $488 million, said it all - New Horizons: Shedding Light on Frontier Worlds.
If the proposed Pluto-Kuiper Belt (PKB) mission takes off in January 2006, obtaining a gravitational boost from Jupiter a year later, the craft would zip past Pluto between 2014 and 2018. That multi-year spread of prospective arrival dates depends on the launch vehicle NASA picks -- either a Delta 4 or Atlas 5 booster -- both of which are slated for first-time liftoffs this year.
Financial future and fate
To date, Congress has coughed up a modest but welcomed $30 million for the PKB mission. Those monies became available against the wishes of the Bush Administration. That funding put money down on a launch vehicle and kick-starting final design work on the spacecraft and instruments.
Thanks largely to behind-the-scenes and in your face political prodding by Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland), the home state of APL, the mission has moved forward on the bureaucratic game board that is the U.S. Congress.
Even APL made note of her firm, resolute persona when announcing the selection in November of the New Horizons proposal.
"We promise a rewarding mission for NASA and for avid space science supporters, such as Senator Barbara Mikulski and the Maryland delegation, who have done so much to advance science and technology in the state," said Richard Roca, APL's director.
However no funding for subsequent years has been green-lighted and it must pass a NASA confirmation review. That appraisal will address just how real the PKB mission schedule is and what technical risks and must-meet milestones are ahead. Another key event is regulatory approval for launch of the mission's nuclear power source.
Early next month, with the release of NASA's budget, the PKB mission team will learn of its financial footing and prospects for flying.
In NASA's current environment of space station cost overruns, agency restructuring, an expensive menu of Mars exploration projects, as well as other space science agenda items, the near half-billion-dollar Pluto trek may be viewed as a costly and unwanted outing.
Econo-class mission
"I'm a big optimist," says Alan Stern, director of Southwest Research Institute's Department of Space Studies here, and principal investigator for New Horizons.
"This mission is so publicly popular. Also, the planetary community has repeatedly supported the mission. They want to see Pluto and the Kuiper Belt explored," Stern told SPACE.com. "It's not hard to be an optimist. But I'm not naive. I realize that this is not a done deal."
"We're moving forward," Stamatios Krimigis, head of APL's Space Department, says. "We're treating our work here as a program that's moving on. We're optimistic and ready to go into the next phase."
On the technical front, Krimigis explains that reaching out for Pluto is not a big deal, in contrast to other spacecraft targets, such as hot-as-hell Mercury. APL's is building the Messenger craft that will survey that planet too.
The PKB mission is a flagship venture, Krimigis notes, showing that outer planet research can be accomplished on econo-class budgets.
Flying spacecraft to the outer planets is typically a costly, $1 billion-plus undertaking, like the now en route Cassini mission to Saturn.
The New Horizons team plans to use cost-cutting measures, such as utilize proven spacecraft subsystems already designed for other APL planetary missions. Saving money, while reducing risk and shortening the project's development schedule is a prime, early objective.
"One of the institutional attractions for us to compete for this mission is to demonstrate a paradigm, as we did with the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft for the inner part of the solar system. Namely, that you can do a first-class mission to the outer planets for an affordable cost."
So come October, given final fiscal year approval to proceed to the next phase, the New Horizons team will have on the order of 40 months to move from blueprint to blastoff. "We are going to be ready to go," says a can-do Krimigis.
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