NASA Chooses Pluto Mission

CheshireCatCO writes: "NASA announced on Thursday that it has selected Alan Stern's Pluto mission proposal, named New Horizons, for phase B study and (hopefully) eventual launch in 2006. Alan is himself one of the top experts on Pluto, and his team consists of many other leaders in the field. It should be a good mission, if only they get the money for it." CNN has a story with some background on the mission. NASA is having a hard time deciding whether the Pluto-Kuiper Express is actually going to launch or not.

Re:Propulsion

[leucadiadude]

I think the article mentioned a 2006 launch with an arrival of 2016.

Re:Hmm

[shogun]

Actually putting another Hubble Space Telescope at the other end of the solar system might enable them to do some very interesting visual intereferometry. Basicly this would create a virtual telescope with an apeture size of about half the width of the solar system.

Re:flyby of uranus or neptune possible?

[CheshireCatCO]

I can't think of any Mars flybys on a Jupiter mission. Galileo did a flyby of Earth and Venus (there's a really nice image of the Earth and Moon from Galileo, and Sagan detected life on Earth from Galileo, much to everyone's relief). It also flew by Ida, an asteroid, and discovered its moon, Dactyl. But I can't think of any Mars passes.

It turns out that you can go to Pluto any year (or probably any month) that you like. Larry Esposito (who had the competing proposal, which was regarded as extremely good, too) shared this with me a few months ago. Apparently, a Venus assist can get you to Pluto, and are availible a lot. But New Horizons is using a Jupiter assist that won't happen nearly as often. I'd guess that the next chance would be roughly 12 years later, when we're more or less aligned the same way again.

Re:Ice on Charon?

[kabloie]

One problem with Europa (and all the Jovian moons to some extent) is that the surface is bombarded with radiation from the monsterous Jovian radiation belts. You'd have to get submerged pretty quickly to live on Europa very long. If there indeed is a ocean underneath.

Pluto is worth visiting too!

[Goonie]

I think it would be a much better use of our money if we sent more probes to Mars.

But we've already had half a dozen or so successful Mars probes. We know quite a lot about it. We know nothing, by comparison, about Pluto. Isn't it worth just one little probe to go have a look?

Additionally, if I understand the problem, is that Pluto is near its closest approach to the Sun (and thus the Earth) at the moment. If we don't do the mission now, it'll be much more difficult when Pluto has moved further away in 2030 or so.

Just for the record...

[Anonymous Coward]

Alan Stern is the PI, and a damn good mission leader. The probe will be built and operated by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory - Those nice folks who built NEAR, got it to that small lump of rock called Eros, had a misburn but were smart enough to have a recovery plan in place, orbited a little late and took good data, and just for the hell of it managed to land on the damn thing.
If the funding holds out - we'll get there, on time and under budget.