WASHINGTON The hard fought battle to send a probe to distant Pluto took a major step forward today. NASA has given a go-ahead for one team to proceed with a preliminary design study for a Pluto-Kuiper Belt (PKB) mission, a spacecraft that could be launched in 2006.
The mission would also explore the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto, a source of comets thought to be a well-spring of water responsible for much of Earths oceans. Comets are also believed to the source of simple precursors of life.
The team picked by NASA blueprinted the Pluto mission as New Horizons: Shedding Light on Frontier Worlds. Principal Investigator for the PKB effort is Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Stern will lead a team including The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland; Ball Aerospace Corporation of Boulder; Stanford University; and NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The winning proposal beat out a competitive bid led by Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, Colorado.
NASA conditions
In a statement issued late today, NASA made it clear that the scientific value of this mission is highly dependent on a 2006 launch that achieves a flyby of Pluto well before 2020.
In order to ensure this launch date, NASA has established two conditions that must be successfully met at the conclusion of the New Horizons study.
First, the mission must pass a confirmation review that will address significant risks such as schedule and technical milestones and regulatory approval for launch of the mission's nuclear power source.
Second, funds must be available. Congress provided $30 million in fiscal year 2002 to initiate PKB spacecraft and science instrument development and launch vehicle procurement.
But theres the catch.
No funding for subsequent years is included in President Bushs budget plan.
Get me to the launch pad on time
In announcing the go-ahead, Ed Weiler, NASA Associate Administrator for Space Science here at the space agencys headquarters, said that the New Horizons proposal "represented
the best science at Pluto and the Kuiper Belt as well as the best plan to bring the spacecraft to the launch pad on time and within budget."
"Visiting Pluto and other Kuiper Belt objects would be like visiting a deep freeze containing samples of the most ancient material in our solar system, the stuff that all the other planets including Earth were made of," added Dr. Colleen Hartman, Solar System Exploration Director in NASA's Office of Space Science.
"But the most exciting thing about going to an unexplored planet is what we may find there that we're not expecting," Hartman said.
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