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:Hmm

[akiaki007]

I'm not sure what you mean?

Putting a Hubble type scope on the satellite wouldn't serve any purpose. As it is, the Hubble lenses can see very far away. Putting it somewhere else in our solar system is pointless, because it wouldn't change the range of the telescope, nor would it change it's field of view. It will still see everything as we can see it here (relatively). And it would take significantly longer to relay information back to Earth for us to look at.

Ice on Charon?

[leucadiadude]

I'm hoping they can get this thing luanched. If there really is ice on Charon, and it's actually water ice, that would make a lot of neat stuff (read manned missions) possible way out there.

If I had a say ...

[Rolo Tomasi]

... in space exploration policy, I would concentrate all efforts to building an observatory on the moon. The Hubble Telescope has a 2.6m mirror and revolutionized astronomy. Just imagine what an 8m telescope on the far side of the moon could discover. Also, radio astronmy is becoming more and more difficult, because of the "radio pollution" on earth. A radio telescope on the far side of the moon, screened from all man-made interference, could bring us a tremendous amount of new insights. Just my $0.02 ...

Importance of Pluto/Charon

[localroger]

When I was a kid there was nothing but artists conceptions (most of which turned out to be wrong) to illustrate what the surfaces of other planets looked like. Now the only one totally left in mystery is Pluto, and it's one of the last great mysteries of our generation to know, as we do of all the other planets, what they look like up close.

Besides which, every time we investigate a new world we learn wonders. Water on Europa! Hydrocarbons on Titan! Rings around Neptune and even (chuckle) Uranus! Young worlds cracked and not fully reformed, worlds of live volcanoes, worlds whose geological processes always seem to come back and illuminate our own, either its current dynamics or its history.

Computer models are not substitute for real experience. And the only source of reale experience is another real world. We have a limited number of these close at hand, and it would be foolish not to explore them all.

As the most distant "world"-sized body Pluto likely holds many secrets to the early history of the Solar System, and to forces at work on our own world during its formation. If nothing else we should investigate it for being the only other dual planet worth the name in the Solar System (besides, of course, Earth-Luna.)

Flybys

[fm6]

Some previous discussion of the trajectory issue here [slashdot.org]. The big lost opportunity for flybys was the "Grand Tour" [uiowa.edu] mission. Would have had to launch in 72 or thereabouts. Bad timing -- that was just when the public felt glutted by space missions, columinating with the showy, but not demonstratively useful, Apollo project.

Re:Importance of Pluto/Charon

[imrdkl]

and it would be foolish not to explore them all.

Would it? I mean sure, plutos a curious little thing, but except for the aforementioned deep-space launch site, what else is there? Resist quoting JFK to me right now, please. And remember it's getting farther away...

A Pluto mission, or any new "deep" (can I get another troll, please?) mission will perpetuate NASA for 10 more years. You either like that, or you dont. Do we give 'em one more chance, fellas and gals? Whaddya say?

Re:Importance of Pluto/Charon

[localroger]

Me:and it would be foolish not to explore them all.

Imrdkl: Would it?

OF COURSE IT WOULD! Consider all the folks who think the Apollo missions were a foolish waste of time. Well, from Apollo we learned that the Moon was once molten, that it has no metallic core, and that its crust is similar to that of Earth. All these things have informed the history of Earth, from which the Moon was probably knocked off in a chance encounter early during her coalescence.

From Mars missions we have learned enough to recognize Martian meteorites, thus getting free extra samples for analysis.

From Jupiter and the other outer planets we have learned that geology is much more complex and unpredicatable than we once thought; in my childhood books these worlds were always described as cold, rocky, silent, and gray, kind of the way Pluto is still described. (You'd think we'd learn.)

The thing about Pluto is we only think we know what we'll find there. So far we've always been wrong about that. Outer Solar System objects are the only direct, unsullied links we have to conditions as they were before the inner planets formed and all the components got mixed up and distilled. Even so one must wonder; was Pluto once molten? Was Charon knocked off of it as our Moon once was, or was it just captured? The similirity between Earth/Luna and Pluto/Charon is itself enough to warrant investigation. What seems like an incredible chance event might be more likely than we think, making the "Rare Earth" hypothesis less "rare." The key is that we don't know what we'll find. One thing we can say with great confidence is that it will actually be a surprise if it is a boring cold sphere of inert frozen crap like my circa 1970 Jr. Science book said.

Re:Importance of Pluto/Charon

[bpowell423]

He didn't say the pads were 8' deep. He said they were 8ft landing pads, meaning diameter. Kind of like big snow shoes. They expected a lot more dust than they found. The reasoning was that they thought they knew how much dust settles on the moon each year and they thought they knew how long the moon has been there, so they did some math and figured out that there should be a lot of dust, hence the big pads so the lander would settle onto the top of the dust rather than sinking. Turns out that the dust was only a 1/2 inch thick or so, meaning either that it doesn't accumulate as fast as they thought, or that the moon is on the order of only several thousand years old. Bottom line is that we discovered something different than we expected, which, I'm sure, has caused people to rethink a few things about the moon.