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Space Science

Funding Approved for Pluto/Kuiper Probe 224

Posted by chrisd from the no-dog-jokes-please dept.
azpenguin writes "While we discuss the acheivements of the now-silent Pioneer 10, Congress has apporved funding for the "New Horizons" mission to send a probe to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Space.com has the story here. NASA had actually fought the idea, but Congress approved the money anyway. Wonder if in 12 years (when the probe is supposed to reach Pluto) the public will be as fascinated with the pictures coming back as much as with the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft."
In related news, dalewj writes "Seems the team at JPL will discontinue operations on the Galileo Space probe to Jupiter after extended the mission three times. Galileo has been in space since 1989 and has some amazing findings and pictures available on the JPL website. Truly NASA and JPL's best effort to date."
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Funding Approved for Pluto/Kuiper Probe More

Funding Approved for Pluto/Kuiper Probe

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  • Did I Read That Right (Score:5, Funny)

    by jade42 ( 608565 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @06:11AM (#5394484) Journal
    Did Congress have to force money on NASA? It must be the last sign. I'm going to the bomb shelter.

    • Re:Did I Read That Right (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I hope the Congress will also give them extra money when the project inevitably runs over-budget... I think the NASA administration was basically thinking that whatever money Pluto-Kuiper express gets, causes an equivalent decrease in other NASA funding. After all, from the Congress's point of view, it's all on the space research account...

    • Re:Did I Read That Right (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hdparm ( 575302 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @06:33AM (#5394550) Homepage
      NASA had argued it was not time to go to the distant, tiny world, but members of the planet science community felt it is important to go soon, while Pluto is favorably positioned and before it enters an even deeper freeze in its long, elongated orbit.

      That's from the article. No mentioning on NASA's web site yet.

      In the light of recent Shuttle disaster, NASA is perhaps more keen on getting money to improve safety on Shuttle missions. Just guessing...

    • Did Congress have to force money on NASA? It must be the last sign. I'm going to the bomb shelter.

      Congress is probably doing this to boost morale after the shuttle disaster, and NASA has other priorities.

    • Yep. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It may be a surprise to people, but a Pluto mission is not a high priority for a lot of planetary scientists. There are many other targets that they would like to focus their attention on. The resurrection of the Pluto mission has been largely due to constituents telling their representatives that they consider it a high priority!

      (Also, a lot of people in NASA and the community would rather do the mission using nuclear electric propulsion, since the mission would arrive at Pluto much more quickly. But, that technology is not expected to be mature until the end of the decade.)

      Last year planetary scientists drew up their "Decadal Survey [aas.org]" which is basically a list of planetary exploration priorities for the next decade. (Congress wanted the list, and will probably consider it a "checklist" of what they should fund for the next ten years.) It's subject to changes based on new findings, but it gives a good idea of what scientists want to focus on. They did eventually decide to include this mission on the list. But, they didn't name it the "Pluto-Kuiper Belt Explorer;" they named it the "Kuiper Belt-Pluto Explorer." Kuiper Belt objects in general are considered important, and Pluto stands out merely because it's the largest of that population of objects.

      If you'd like to get a feeling for what planetary scientists want to fly over the next few years, skim that documents. There's some very cool plans in there.

      - A friendly neighborhood astrophysicist
    • Something similar, on a larger scale, happens to the military fairly often. Somebody comes up with a whiz-bang idea for a new weapons system (which may or may not actually do the job) and the DoD says, "Ehhhh, no, we don't really need that, we'd rather spend the money on M16 ammunition for training [or something else equally unsexy]" -- but it turns out that the main contractor for the weapons system is in some influential Senator's home state, and whaddya know, the military is stuck with another white elephant. The utterly worthless Patriot missile system (which may actually have killed more US troops than it ever saved) is an example of this, IIRC.

  • Or... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Max Romantschuk ( 132276 ) <max@romantschuk.fi> on Thursday February 27, 2003 @06:11AM (#5394486) Homepage
    Wonder if in 12 years (when the probe is supposed to reach Pluto) the public will be as fascinated with the pictures coming back as much as with the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft."

    Then again, the public might already be bored with the pics from the probe sent to Pluto in 10 years, with a vastly superior propulsion system which gets it there in one year ;)
  • NASA _fought_ this? WTF?!
    • NASA _fought_ this? WTF?!

      I'd guess NASA has an idea for something else that they'd much rather spend money on, and they were planning on asking Congress for money, but now they can't because they've already been given this.

      • Re:say what? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Tumbleweed ( 3706 )
        I'd guess NASA has an idea for something else that they'd much rather spend money on, and they were planning on asking Congress for money, but now they can't because they've already been given this.

        Hey, they can always ask. It's not like there's a budget anymore - what with what's being spent on the impending war, nobody's going to notice if NASA's budget gets tripled over the next two years. It'll just be a rounding error.

        I bet NASA would just waste more money on ISS, anyway.

        Bring back the DC-X!
    • > NASA _fought_ this? WTF?!

      Money for science is money taken away from the Shuttle/ISS pork barrel.

      NASA does damn good science, but now that the accountants are in charge instead of the engineers, the aforementioned damn good science only gets done when NASA is browbeaten into doing it.

  • This is good news (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ODD97 ( 645414 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @06:13AM (#5394491) Homepage
    Although I certainly won't have first post (having broken the unwritten "don't read the article first" rule), I would like to state that this seems like a good idea to me. I hope they put communications systems in it that will work for another 30 years, as a gift to the future $people_like_me that weren't alive while Pioneer 10 completed its stated mission, yet enjoyed reading about the communications with the spacecraft.
    I don't understand the line "Though NASA fought the concept, Congress wrote the money into the space agency's 2003 budget" however. Can someone explain this?

    • Re:This is good news (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Can someone explain this?

      Basically, Congress is giving an inaugural award for outstanding achievement in the field of excellence

    • Re:This is good news (Score:5, Interesting)

      by anubi ( 640541 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @07:05AM (#5394628) Journal
      When you are looking at something as incredibly complex as a space flight - 500 million sure isn't much.. over here in Southern California, USA, it is not surprising to see something like a high class home go for something like that.

      I understand NASA was fighting the concept because they felt the money would be better spent on shuttle studies and Mars activity. Not that they did not want the money, they just did not want to earmark it onto a mission to Pluto.

      Consider though the design and launch of such a thing will train another group of engineers in the art of spacecraft design. There are still many of us, now in our 50's and 60's that originally designed a lot of the missions when they were popular in the late 70's, but we are aging. We won't be around forever. And, due to budget cutbacks, a lot of us that have designed spacefaring circuitry are no longer in the industry. As I type this, I pulled a couple of old references I had, reviewing just for the heck of it an Energy Detector design for studying the Van Allen belts and the multiplexer design for the Explorer VII spacecraft launched in the 60's.

      But not many of us lived through that heyday. If a new cadre of engineers are not trained on an unmanned exploratory mission, they get to train on a manned one. I would kinda like them to train and hone their skills on something like this. Back in the old days, we had very little to build our stuff with.. most of it was pre-integrated circuit... like we made them with individual transistors. And we were very concerned with how the transistors degraded with respect to radiation dosages - as nearly all circuits were linear. Today we have much better parts - lower power too- but there are other problems involved that the later parts today are far more sensitive to radiation than those big clunky ones we used. Even before that, our vacuum tubes were immune, for all practical purposes, to EMP - such as static discharges or , God forbid - nuclear artifact. I still use a vacuum-tube oscilloscope when I repair vacuum-tube guitar amps for friends because its front end is immune to the several hundred volt potentials I encounter on the plates of the vacuum tubes.

      I know we just about could tell you how many electrons were in the battery, and we had to make such miserly usage of them. You would probably be surprised at all the tricks those guys went through to conserve every last electron of the flow of current.

      Even our early receivers are works of art. Cryogenic tuners. By building resonators out of superconductors, we could get the "Q" sensitivity high enough to still see our birds as they transmitted on miniscule amounts of energy. The trick was in integration and probability analyses. Stuff like that takes time to learn. And it just about has to be hands-on too. Kinda like learning to walk. You fall a few times.. ( or you set a few rockets back on the ground a few feet from the launch point, launch things into useless trajectories, or launch things that don't work). The phrase that went around during that time was "launching a Maytag"... because the satellites of the day were about the size of a washing machine, and were just about as useful as one if they did not fulfill their intended function.

      • Re:This is good news (Score:5, Insightful)

        by AlecC ( 512609 ) <aleccawley@gmail.com> on Thursday February 27, 2003 @07:23AM (#5394660)
        I agree with you. While I want, and will support if I can, manned space flight, I think that the unmanned deep space probes are a second strand which actully delivers more value for money. We need to keep that second strand alive. And $300m expected total cost of the mission ($504m cap) is tiny compared to the spending on Shuttle/ISS.

        Apart from anything else, the thinking about designes that *have* to work for 12 years and that you *can't* fix is, IMO, most healthy for NASA. Of course the jury is still out on Columbia, but if it turns out to be tile damage, that shuttle was doomed from liftoff: they had no way of fixing damaged tiles in orbit. NASA has got into the way of thinking that any componen only has to last one flight (Shuttle) or till the next resupply mission (ISS). The rest of the world doesn't work like that: woule you accept a car that needed new tires, an engine overhaul, and a massive safety check after each tankfull of fuel? The rest of the world works either on built to last the lifetime of the object, or at leas a long working life.

        • The prime value of manned space flight currently is in engaging young imaginations. I'm sure we do get more scientific value, more cheaply, from unmanned probes. But kids want to be astronauts when they grow up, not mission monitors for unmanned probes. Obviously most such kids don't become astronauts, but at least some stay in the field, and end up working on unmanned scientific missions.

          The astronauts are a bait for luring kids into the science and engineering professions.

          As they mature, the unmanned missions will become more interesting and motivation. Within my memory, only Sputnik and Sojourner grabbed attention near that of astronauts, with Laika and Voyager (and possibly a Lunar surveyer) following right behind.

      • Re:This is good news (Score:4, Informative)

        by benzapp ( 464105 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @09:13AM (#5394977)
        500 million sure isn't much.. over here in Southern California, USA, it is not surprising to see something like a high class home go for something like that.

        I just wanted to point out that figure is HIGHLY innacurate. I seriously doubt there are any private homes in the entire state of California which go for 10% of that value. $500 million is a lot of money.

        As an example, AOL Time Warner are building a fairly large mixed use development by Columbus Circle in Manhattan. This is a HIGHLY desirable area. The complex has two 55 story towers. As you can see from this story [icsc.org], the entire cost of this building is $1.7 billion, a little more than 3 times the value of this house of which you speak.

        Even in Manhattan, the most expensive real estate market in the nation, I have never seen any residential property close to $500 million, unless you are referring to a while high rise. A full floor, 20,000 square foot condo on 5th avenue accross from central park might cost $50 million, maybe more. But not much.

        Some oversized mansions from another age might fetch $100 million, but they are rarely on the market.

        Anyway, just wanted to make that correction while the coffee has me spirited.

      • Why would NASA fight this? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by slugfro ( 533652 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @12:42PM (#5396754) Homepage
        I understand NASA was fighting the concept because they felt the money would be better spent on shuttle studies and Mars activity. Not that they did not want the money, they just did not want to earmark it onto a mission to Pluto.
        Good point and I would like to expand a little more. Right now NASA is very concerned with public image. If the public and government views NASA as beneficial then funding will continue to come. Likewise, if NASA is seen as wasting money then future budgets may get cut.

        That being said, NASA would much rather spend this money on something that will show direct results quickly. The Pluto mission will not have any results until 2015 when the probe finally reaches the planet. I'm sure that scientifically NASA doesn't mind going forward with a Pluto mission but from a budget standpoint they would rather have used the money for something else.
      • 500 million sure isn't much.. over here in Southern California, USA, it is not surprising to see something like a high class home go for something like that.

        Are you sure you don't mean, here in Southern Syria Planum, Mars? I've never heard of a $500M house, and I live in San Diego.

      • Consider though the design and launch of such a thing will train another group of engineers in the art of spacecraft design. There are still many of us, now in our 50's and 60's that originally designed a lot of the missions when they were popular in the late 70's, but we are aging.

        While I appreciate that keeping the engineering teams trained is a good thing and I'm in no way against this particular mission, I was wondering if you could please clarify what you're saying here.

        Specifically, is there any reason why the engineering teams need to be trained up on a mission going to the Kuiper belt? There's hardly a lack of current [nasa.gov] and future [nasa.gov] JPL missions that involve sending probes to other bodies in the Solar System.

  • 12 years? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mraymer ( 516227 )
    Sorry if this sounds a little trollish, but I have to ask... With the new "Better, Faster, Cheaper" theme, is NASA up to the task of having a probe last that long, especially when a lot of their current attention is still focused on the shuttle disaster?

    Personally, I'd rather see more money spent on human spaceflight, such as the necessary refitting/redesigning of the shuttles. Probes are great, but Pluto just isn't that exciting to me. It's a small, cold rock. Then again, I guess we don't know for sure until we get a better look at it.

    • Pluto not exciting...? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27, 2003 @06:46AM (#5394580)

      Take a look at what Voyager 2 found out about Triton [arizona.edu], which it only passed by default.

      Pluto [arizona.edu] is very contrasty, it would be good to find out why that is, too.

    • Re:12 years? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by $$$$$exyGal ( 638164 )
      NASA's track record seems to indicate that they'll happily keep monitoring any craft for eternity as long as it is still sending signals. The hard part is building the craft for several years. They'll have to collect money from U.S. tax payers over the course of multiple presidents to get enough funding for many projects. That's the hard part.

      --sex [slashdot.org]

    • Re:12 years? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by de la mettrie ( 27199 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @07:19AM (#5394651)
      Personally, I'd rather see more money spent on human spaceflight, such as the necessary refitting/redesigning of the shuttles. Probes are great, but Pluto just isn't that exciting to me.

      You need to distinguish between your objectives. Human spaceflight serves no immediate purpose. It is a long-term investment for the day where we have the resources and technology to travel to other stars and colonize the galaxy. But in the here and now, it's entertainment: money spent with no productive use. (And better spent, if I may add this, than on automobile races, or presidential campaigns, or certain wars, or any other form of TV entertainment).

      The Pluto probe, on the other hand, is science, pure and simple. It's not meant to be exciting, except for scientifically minded people. I won't go on about the reasons for science...

    • Very exciting Re:12 years? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dreamchaser ( 49529 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @08:48AM (#5394884) Homepage Journal
      Pluto and other Kuiper belt objects are made out of the stuff that the entire Solar System was formed of. Personally, I find the 'archaeology' of our home star system to be quite interesting, and this could indeed turn up some exciting results.

      If we have learned anything from past probes, it's that we'll always learn something we never expected. That prospect is not exciting?

      The eternal quest for knowledge and to understand our history is one of the things that makes us what we are.
    • Personally, I'd rather see more money spent on human spaceflight, such as the necessary refitting/redesigning of the shuttles.

      Great, pour money into keeping some old wrecks on the road for a while longer so they can kill more people...

      The necessary redesign of the shuttle involves a car crusher.

      I can understand people who are attached to Concorde and so why it is made to keep stagerring on. It's a beautiful aircraft and was a wonder when it was new. The shuttle was designed by politicians and bean counters, is ugly as sin and an all around embarassment to the planet. It should never have been, still less should it have been kept alive zombie-like for so long.

      Probes are great, but Pluto just isn't that exciting to me. It's a small, cold rock.

      A lot more interesting than anything the manned space programme has done since Apollo.

      The whole project budget is of the same order as one(!) shuttle flight.

  • Budgets... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous MadCoe ( 613739 ) <maakiee@NoSpam.yahoo.com> on Thursday February 27, 2003 @06:20AM (#5394507) Homepage
    What really strikes me is the money needed to do this...

    Total mission under $504 Mil.

    That really isn't bad, there are F1 teams that spend that type of money in one season, and most F1 teams will spend that type of money in two seasons.

    You really can't fight any war for that kind of money.

    Compared to other things this is quite cheap, if only more people would realise that the prices of space exploration aren't that bad...
    • ... to go look for small rocks orbiting a bigger rock on the edge of the solar system.

      The New Horizons spacecraft would be able to detect Pluto satellites down to 0.62 miles (1 kilometer) ...
      Other satellites might have gone unnoticed and, if there, should tell a great deal about planet and comet formation in the outer solar system.

      I'd rather see the money used in general R&D on the space ladder or a plane that can make low orbit. Lets get a better and cheaper system for getting things into space first. Then we can send out 1000's of _cheap_ probes to look for this worthless^H^H^H^Hfull information.

      That money may not get us a space ladder, but it will get us 500 million dollars closer to it.
      • The space ladder is an engaging idea, but it really is a pipe dream, almost in the Ringworld class. When it's still a massive struggle to build a 400 ft weightless framework, how can you seriously consider building something whose length is three times the diameter of the Earth itself? Not to mention that while we can understand how a space ladder will keep itself aloft, we haven't the beginnings of an idea to fulfill these two big blocks.

        1, Grounding the ladder in the first place.

        2. What kind of material we can use that can hold the thing together.

        Space Ladders today are almost as much of the product of fiction as Ringworld. Maybe, someday, our distant ancestors will figure out ways we can't even think of right now. But that is far enough into the future that a Kuiper Express project isn't going to put a significant delay on it. Spending such money on space ladder research will do nothing but throw money down an unproductive hole.

    • Re:Budgets... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by $$$$$exyGal ( 638164 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @06:43AM (#5394576) Homepage Journal
      Now you've done it. Never say that hundreds of millions of dollars is not very much money. Regardless of the context, you'll start a flame war.

      But $504 Million dollars is a lot of money! I could brush everyone's teeth in America with that money! Twice!

      --sex [slashdot.org]

    • Re:Budgets... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ratamacue ( 593855 )
      there are F1 teams that spend that type of money in one season

      F1 teams, howerver, acquire their revenue through voluntary means. The people who invest in the F1 team have personally chosen to endorse the team. When the F1 team makes a bad investment, they experience a loss. If they can't figure out how to invest their revenue wisely, they will be eliminated from the market and replaced with a better F1 team.

      NASA, by contrast, aquires their revenue through the force of government. The people who pay for NASA did not personally choose to endorse the organization. They are given a choice: pay up, leave the country, or go to prison. This "choice" is hardly equivalant to the choice made by F1 investors. When NASA makes a bad investment, they experience no loss -- it wasn't their money in the first place! When a government agency makes a bad investment, more often than not they are rewarded with more revenue.

      Perhaps we should be thinking about ways to privatize the space industry, instead of thinking of ways to continue funneling tax dollars into an organization which (and I'm sorry I have to say this) dramatically failed its investors at least twice and continues to recieve funding, whether the investors (taxpayers) approve of it or not.

  • Look out for Greenpeace and their ilk... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by de la mettrie ( 27199 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @06:23AM (#5394518)
    Unfortunately, the problems haven't even started yet for this mission.

    Pretty much anything going to the outer system must have a radiothermoisotopic battery aboard, which powers the craft by using the warmth of decaying radioactive isotopes. It's too dark for solar cells out there.
    And to get out there, probes must use slingshot trajectories around inner system planets, usually including Earth. It is conceivable, if highly improbable, that a navigation error (insert unit conversion joke) would cause the probe to impact Earth instead of passing it by.

    In sum, be prepared for a repeat of the Cassini craze [animatedsoftware.com].
    • Unfortunately, due to the Columbia disaster, they will have even more ammunition. Obviously, Columbia and the Pluto-Rocket (Plutocket ;-)) wouldn't have the same types of probabilities of hitting a populated area, but that doesn't matter to the general public.

      --sex [slashdot.org]

      • Re:Look out for Greenpeace and their ilk... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @01:49PM (#5397606)
        > Unfortunately, due to the Columbia disaster, they will have even more ammunition. Obviously, Columbia and the Pluto-Rocket (Plutocket ;-)) wouldn't have the same types of probabilities of hitting a populated area, but that doesn't matter to the general public.

        RANT

        FUCK Greenpeace.

        During the 50s and 60s - the era of atmospheric nuclear testing - we dumped 3300 KILOGRAMS [lanl.gov] of plutonium.

        And didn't just disperse this 3300 kilos of Pu by means of Skylabbing or Columbi-izing a few hundred space probes' worth of nicely-encapsulated RTGs, we dispersed it all by vaporizing it with giant-azz atomic bombs.

        If there were any risk to public health posed by the (unlikely) re-entry of a failed space probe and the (even more unlikely) disintegration of a few pounds of Pu in an RTG on re-entry, we'd already be dead, hundreds of times over, because we've already had the worst-case scenario played out, hundreds of times over.

        > but that doesn't matter to the general public.

        Yeah, you're right, "that doesn't matter to the general public". Scientific illiteracy among the general public is the subject for another rant, another day.

        While I think the Shuttle's a waste of time and money, I lament the end of manned space exploration, because when I was growing up in public school, I could at least dream of a day when I could board a rocketship and get away from these morons, forever.

        End rant.

    • Re:Look out for Greenpeace and their ilk... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by g4dget ( 579145 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @07:11AM (#5394640)
      At issue is not whether RTGs can be made safe in principle--they can. But after the spectacular failures of NASA over the last couple of decades, as well as getting more insight into the kinds of stupid safety and engineering decisions NASA and their contractors seem to be making, I am not convinced that NASA can put together a reasonably safe RTG. A scenario where the probe blows up some time during launch and a poorly designed RTG just vaporizes seems quite possible given NASA's other failures. I hope NASA's designs will be very carefully reviewed and audited by outsiders because this is a matter that affects everybody.
    • Greenpeace only has so many resources.

      Maybe we can clearcut a forrest or start a war or something right about the launch time for this probe?

  • Plans for a new Star Trek are already underway... (Score:3, Funny)

    by MrFreshly ( 650369 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @06:23AM (#5394519)
    Featuring a long lost outer solar system probe calling itself "Ne zon"...Due to budget cut backs arising from failing public interests, this film will be funded by automobile company "Nissan" in exchange for exclusive rights of the Star Trek logo which will replace the Nissan logos on all 2005+ vehicles.

    well...It couldn't be any worse than Star Trek V.

  • Nasa's revenge (Score:4, Funny)

    by garbs ( 121069 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @06:24AM (#5394522)
    Nasa's revenge for getting funding forced for the mission.

    They'll crash the probe into the planet before getting pictures.

    Hmmm, maybe there is some sorta secret Nasa installation on Pluto, maybe that's why Nasa doesn't want the funding for the mission.
    • > Nasa's revenge for getting funding forced for the mission.
      > They'll crash the probe into the planet before getting pictures.

      Naw, no pork in that. (12 years of sitting around waiting for it to pancake doesn't qualify for a budget allocation.)

      Instead, I'll bet they'll pull some strings so that it can only be launched on the Shuttle, and so that the probe fails a day or two after launch.

      The "solution" will be another $300M to build a new probe - and another $500M for another Shuttle flight to launch it.

      Stop thinking like an engineer and start thinking like an accountant :-/

  • This is what NASA should be about (Score:4, Insightful)

    by eclectro ( 227083 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @06:26AM (#5394531)

    Going places where we have not been before. It makes more sense (and is more cost effective) than man marking time in the space station.

    The have to do this mission soon while Pluto is in the "warm" part of of its' orbit.

  • don't want to go? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    the article did't state any objection of nasa other than "the timing is not right".

    taking that statment and adding some speculation, i take it to mean that maybe something might be in the path of pluto, or maybe Nasa can't get the flight path presise enough (some little factor might put the probe on a wacky non-plutonian path). I think that the pioneer satelite just left the solar system, so i dont think that is a prolem (nothing like an atmostere on earth to slow you down, unless you belive that weird theory that photons can slow an object.)

    • the article did't state any objection of nasa other than "the timing is not right".

      taking that statment and adding some speculation, i take it to mean that maybe something might be in the path of pluto, or maybe Nasa can't get the flight path presise enough....

      I'd bet the timing issue is political, not technical.

  • AOL Poll (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27, 2003 @06:28AM (#5394538)
    A poll I was just reading on AOL. Remember this is voted on by AOL members. The results might surprise you.

    Should manned flights into space be halted?

    88% No, its our duty to explore space 2,152
    12% Yes, the risk of loss of life is too great 285
    Total votes: 2,437

    Should the funding Nasa gets (currently $14bn per year) be increased?

    82% Yes, the benefits space exploration bring are massive 1,964
    18% No, far too much money is spent for too little benefit 445
    Total votes: 2,409

    NOTE: Poll results are not scientific and reflect the opinions of only those users who chose to participate.

  • And Project Prometheus... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by $$$$$exyGal ( 638164 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @06:30AM (#5394543) Homepage Journal
    Bush quietly signed an omnibus bill last week, SPACE.com has learned.

    That, and Bush talked about Project Prometheus [space.com] in his State of the Union Address. It seems like Bush wants to be remembered for something more than just Iraq.

    --sex [slashdot.org]

    • Re:And Project Prometheus... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Phroggy ( 441 ) <slashdot3@@@phroggy...com> on Thursday February 27, 2003 @07:45AM (#5394714) Homepage
      It seems like Bush wants to be remembered for something more than just Iraq.

      We've forgotten about Afghanistan already?
    • It seems like Bush wants to be remembered for something more than just Iraq

      1) Well if that's the case he wouldn't have signed it "quietly" (the article's term).

      2) Knowing nothing about the "omnibus" bill, my first guess would be that the funding was just one of many "riders" on a totally unrelated bill. IANAPolitician.

  • Sounds political to me (Score:4, Insightful)

    by vandan ( 151516 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @06:39AM (#5394563) Homepage
    What do politicians care about exploring Pluto?
    This is just another superiority assertion by the US government. The fact that NASA was against the mission shows how much the government cares about the opinions of those who will be actually performing the mission.
    WTF are we going to find on Pluto? How about that moon that may have a liquid ocean beneath it's surface? (can't remember it's name) It's closer, it will cost lest and happen faster. There's far more potential of finding something interesting.

    • Re:Sounds political to me (Score:5, Informative)

      by de la mettrie ( 27199 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @07:03AM (#5394621)
      What do politicians care about exploring Pluto? This is just another superiority assertion by the US government.

      Maybe. But it makes sense scientifically (look at the story for the why of it), and what is life but a series of contests? If not for the ideological dick-waving contest in the 60s, there would have been no Apollo.

      How about that moon that may have a liquid ocean beneath it's surface?

      You are correct that landing a probe on Europa (insert ominous Kubrick film warning) would be desirable. However, that's several more levels of technical complexity. You need to deploy a lander on the surface (no atmosphere = reaction engines = fuel = heavy = cost), then penetrating a kilometer-thick ice crust (power = radiothermic generator = heavy, also evil), then deploy an autonomous (the comm delay is measured in hours) microsubmarine equipped with all the instruments usually found in an entire university laboratory. Which in turn require bandwidth. And more power. And very good control software.

      In short, it's probably doable (what isn't?), but it would cost orders of magnitude more than the Pluto/Kuiper probe.

    • Re:Sounds political to me (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Going to Pluto does not exclude going to Europa. The urgency of launching for Pluto soon is that Pluto is close now. The longer we wait, the longer it will take to get there. Jupiter's orbit is not as eccentric as Pluto's. We have more opportunities for launching missions to Jupitor and its moons. A flyby of the Jovian system can be a part of the trip to Pluto. It may even be a required part for the slingshot effect. It means that more research of Europa can be done on the way to Pluto. Europa and other targets in closer to Earth are also subjects that other space agencies besides NASA can study. Going to Pluto is, like you said, a way for US to show they can still lead. That doesn't keep any other space agency from going to Europa. Most importantly, Europa is tricky. NASA is about to destroy a probe to protect Europa. Anything any Earth space agency sends there has to be designed to observe Europa without exposing the potential life Europa to danger. We don't to repeat mistakes made on Earth.
    • What do politicians care about exploring Pluto?


      I bet this project is really funded by Disney [geocities.com]. They are hoping to extract additional profit from use of their trademark!

  • Question... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by natron 2.0 ( 615149 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `97sretepdn'> on Thursday February 27, 2003 @06:53AM (#5394602) Homepage Journal
    I am all for space exploration, and sending probes out on new fact finding missions. Why do we need to send one all the way to Pluto? Is it that much of a concern to us? We know it is a barren icy wasteland, what more do we need? Not to mention it will take it 12 yeaars to get there! I am sure there is much more closer objects and items we could explore that would be more cost effective.

    • It seems is not to go where no man has gone before but

      1) To get proper pictures of pluto (it seems telescopes are not good enuff
      and 2) to get a view of outer space unhindered by the space dust of the solar system ....
      Some links
      here [spaceref.com] and here [cord.edu]

    • Re:Question... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Phroggy ( 441 )
      I am all for space exploration, and sending probes out on new fact finding missions. Why do we need to send one all the way to Pluto? Is it that much of a concern to us? We know it is a barren icy wasteland, what more do we need? Not to mention it will take it 12 yeaars to get there! I am sure there is much more closer objects and items we could explore that would be more cost effective.

      Perhaps this is why NASA was opposed to the idea? The politicians who pushed it forward weren't necessarily thinking about the best thing for science, but rather the best thing for politics.
  • On NPR a scientist was saying that space station funding and cooperation with Russia was at a standstill because they are helping Iran work towards a nuclear powerplant. So congress wont give them money, then they force money on NASA. That aside, I hate space exploration. I want our problems solved first. Why go out there when we are so busy trying to kill ourselves here? I do not understand the point of exploring space at all, its such a waste of money, time, and resources. I am a geek, and that makes me realize the folly all the more. Until we develop the tech to do it right, Blow it off.
    • There is absolutely *nothing* going on on the ISS that could in any way be considered important (or at least remotely worth the expenses). And Pluto/Kuiper Belt space exploration seems to be pretty pointless, too, I agree with you here.

      On the other side, we *have* to make some progress and the only way we know how is "learning by doing". Research should not always be about instant gratification and sometimes solutions to our problems come from unexpected discoveries. There is a very real need to know as much about our universe as we possibly can figure out.

      So, we got to remain active on the space thing or else we won't evolve technologically in that area when it would be rewarding in the long run. Now, why that doesn't mean we establish a Moon and/or Mars colony and do some actual space faring instead of sending countless billion-dollar-probes on suicide missions to return almost no useful data - THAT escapes my limited understanding completely.

      Can someone enlighten me on that one?

      Let's at least build an automated assembly station on the moon (or something like that) so we can launch "mass produced" probes in a more efficient manner. That's because the cost of getting something in space is still a very huge expense because we're way in the stone ages when it comes to propulsion. And in addition, custom-designing and custom-manufacturing of probes is very expensive. Let's just make more, general purpose probes and send have them start from a low gravity place! Let's go to space using a collection of standardized off-the-shelf components! Why not? (This is normally the point where pseudo-experts jump in and rant about complexity of space missions, but keep in mind that the *actual* reason may be because there is a huge industry that has nothing to gain and everything to loose if space exploration would be made cheaper and more efficient. Our civilization is paralyzed by it's inherent corruption, sometimes it seems like we can almost never get anything actually done.)
      • And in addition, custom-designing and custom-manufacturing of probes is very expensive. Let's just make more, general purpose probes and send have them start from a low gravity place! Let's go to space using a collection of standardized off-the-shelf components! Why not?

        Because even though the cost of the probes is high, much of the costs are in the launch and the people manning the uplink to the probe make up the lions share of the costs (just launching can be more than half the entire budget). Since the launches are so expensive any probe launched which doesn't perform is a waste of the money spent to get it into orbit.

        I don't think simply making numerous cheap probes and spending many millions of dollars to throw them into an orbit to often fail would be better on the budget than the current method.

        One way to overcome this is to have NASA focus on reducing the cost/kg of launch systems by pursuing alternate launch methods. Doing this could have a significant effect on both scientific and commercial use of LEO and beyond.

        • Amen to that. Individual satellites are expensive, as a friend in the Canadian Space Agency told me, mainly due to the R&D and construction of one-shot fabrication equipment. Imagine introducing assembly-line style mass production and modular designs to satellite construction. Sure, each individual satellite may be less effective than the current idea of custom-building, but a thousand less-effective mass production satellites may be more effective than a single custom satellite. I'm certain the idea has crossed the minds of others, I'm not claiming it to be original. :)

          And as for launches, what about Earth-based mass drivers? A google search turns up tons of concept art sketches and PhD-level papers. Does anyone have anything easier to understand for someone with a liberal-arts-undergrad level of physics knowledge, with regard to current research on them?

          Offtopic, but it would be nice if there were a dumbing-down checkbox on Google. "I want searches in the range of: 1) Grade school 2) High school 3) College 4) Richard Feynman."

    • How do we develop the tech to 'do it right' without trial and experimentation?

      Oh right. So the Wright brothers shouldn't have bothered with that 'Wright Flyer' shit, they should have waited until they could build a 747.

      You, sir, are a blithering idiot.
    • Why go out there when we are so busy trying to kill ourselves here?


      So, is this like a trick question or what?

    • Re:Why oh why? Isnt the Space Station more importa (Score:4, Insightful)

      by DemiKnute ( 237008 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @10:25AM (#5395433)
      That aside, I hate space exploration. I want our problems solved first.

      Yeah, because nothing [nasa.gov] useful [spacetechhalloffame.org]
      has ever [amazon.com] come [astronomynv.org]
      from space [luvyduvy.com] research. Jesus man, science for the sake of science is what got our civilization to the advanced state is in today. You don't know the impact space technology has had on your and my life.

      Until we develop the tech to do it right, Blow it off.

      Yeah, Nasa oughta just sit on their asses until one day the one true idea strikes them and they figure out how to do it right. This is how they figure out how to do it.

  • The reason to visit pluto.. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27, 2003 @07:09AM (#5394634)
    Apparently the idea of the mission is not just ot go where no man has gone before , but

    1) Find out about the planet since telescopic pictures are not good enuff..

    2)Look out from the near-zero atmosphere of pluto out into space, unhindered but particles of the solar system

    Some links here [cord.edu] and here [spaceref.com] about these..... (Rudimentary googling, I am no expert)

  • If we are even here in 12 years (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @08:42AM (#5394862) Homepage Journal
    Consider what is going on, we may be 1/2 dead in 12 years from some moron releasing small pox or something..

    That aside, it sounds like a cool endeavor. And while we wont learn much that is practical, expirements just for the sake of science are still good.
    • Yeah, not to mention another moron who's willing to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war for oil.
      • They made fools of the US, and a threat in general, they should be punished severely or other pinhead countries will see it as open season on this country, and others.

        There is a difference in being a bully, and protecting your turf.

        Oil resources is a factor I admit, but its down low on the list.

  • APL (Score:3, Informative)

    by Merk00 ( 123226 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @08:47AM (#5394880)
    For those who think NASA is no longer up to the task of building a deep space probe, they should be happy to know that New Horizons is being designed, built, and run by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory [jhuapl.edu]. APL has a fifty year history of building space craft with exactly one catastrophic failure. New Horizons happens to be the only space craft going to the outer planets that has not been built by NASA.


    Besides the funding issue, the other main problem with New Horizons is the fact that neither of the two launch platforms (Titan 4, Atlas 5) have been certified. They both, however, did launch successfully last fall.

  • The New Horizons spacecraft would be able to detect Pluto satellites down to 0.62 miles (1 kilometer) as it approaches the planet, but finding large satellites in advance would benefit the mission, Stern says.
    Hopefully someone at NASA didn't round that kilometer figure, and then have reporters converting that 1.00 kilometer to 0.62 miles. If it was 0.55 km, it would be 0.34 miles - round the 0.55 km to 1.00 km, then have the reporter convert that 1.00 km to 0.62 miles - aargh!

    Anyone out there interested in these figures who still use miles and ciceros?

  • I swear, if NASA awakens Cthulu, Shub-Niggurath, or any evil Fungi from Yuggoth I'm going to be mighty... uh... angry. I don't want to be eaten by any cosmic evil, not yet, not at least until my own evil grows powerful enough to counter it.

    Thats right, I'm here to give Pitr a run for his money.

    evilmoe [blogspot.org]

  • A Theory (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NetGyver ( 201322 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @09:17AM (#5394996) Journal
    It strikes me kind of odd that NASA fought congress about the Pluto/Kuiper Probe. Science is science, space is space, Their giving NASA the money, what's the problem?

    The only conclusion i can come up with is that
    NASA wanted money for something else. That and perhaps congress wanted to get a signal to NASA. "Hey NASA, try building something that'll last for a while, something that you don't have to strip and rebuild every time. It'll give you practice, and with that practice you can put that experience into making better, more reliable shuttles."

    I read that Bush signed off on nuclear engines a bit ago, basically paving the way for a missle defense system or some such. (memory's sketchy, but i believe that's the case) I'm surprised that NASA wouldn't try to develop those engines and incorperate them into the pluto probe. It'd make the journey faster and it'd be a good way to test-drive them.

    In any case, NASA needs a project like this. No doubt, the pioneer 10 misson was very exciting to see. Old tech still kicking and doing it's job way longer then it was expected to. That tells me that NASA really knew how to build things that l-a-s-t back in the day.

    There's hardly any info on Pluto to begin with, and the only pictures we have are fuzzy distant images or artists' conceptions. I'd really like to see actual pictures of pluto up-close-and-personal myself.

    All in all, if NASA works on this hard, and there's no hangups, this probe should last a good long time.

  • Space stories bring out the idiot armchair experts (Score:5, Informative)

    by ediron2 ( 246908 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @10:16AM (#5395368) Journal
    OMFG!

    There needs to be a mod for nonexpert-blowing-posteriorized-smoke!

    Having seen the goop that was modded way up as I scanned this, I feel compelled to reply to several messages at once:

    Natron 2.0: Why do we need to send one all the way to Pluto? Is it that much of a concern to us? We know it is a barren icy wasteland, what more do we need?
    Change that to "we suspect..." and please read/internalize a quote from Werner Von Braun: "Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." Go grab a copy of Heinlein's remarks on receiving heart surgery that was a byproduct of the space age. Research incidental discoveries of every planetary fly-by we've done (every one taught us something noteworthy). Try to find the tenuous links between exploration and discoveries. And stop spouting off opinions with the wrong verb.
    westyvw: That aside, I hate space exploration. I want our problems solved first. Why go out there when we are so busy trying to kill ourselves here? I do not understand the point of exploring space at all, its such a waste of money, time, and resources. I am a geek, and that makes me realize the folly all the more. Until we develop the tech to do it right, Blow it off.
    (I deleted an extensive flame, questioning westyvw's parentage and marvelling at his ability to exist without the brains normally needed for autonomic activity)

    If I'm not mistaken, there aren't a lot of Al Qaeda space launches. In fact, I see a pretty strong link between hateful regimes and the utter lack of money spent on basic research in any humanitarian or scientific field. A lot has been learned in pursuit of warlike activities, admittedly, but just because we can't bend these backwaters' worldthink to our enlightened ways, doesn't mean we should sit around and wait for them to agree with us before we continue advancing.

    Still, by your logic, I'd at least prioritize. TV, Brittney Spears, novels, the arts, all sports, all cuisine and restaurants, and a few dozen other pursuits are a greater waste of time than scientific research. Live an ascetic life and then come back telling me that the money can be better spent elsewhere. Oh, and your 'net connection... no, make that anything electronic you own... are all forfeit unless needed in a specific mission to combat death and despotism worldwide.

    I hope the above paragraph is the stupidest, scariest thing you've ever read. Your belief has an underlying kernel of truth that can best be laid bare by just thinking of the absurdity of self-denial until everyone else in the world stops being so wrong-headed. Like communism, it's a nobel (a freudian typo?... I meant noble) idea that so far fails in every implementation.

    Developing the 'tech to do it right' without practice is impossible and absurd. Heck, even in modern times, new boat designs have sunk fresh out of the drydock. We explore, we learn, and we stretch into the most unfamiliar areas first because they sometimes reveal deeper questions we didn't even know we should ask. Also we spend years dissecting the failures for lessons and improvements.

    Who the FSCK modded this up (as insightful) to a 5??

    --------

    In a followup, thasmudyan suggests we skip the unmanned cheap exploration and instead set up a mars colony, then contradicts him/herself by suggesting that the space station is worthless in paragraph one and then suggesting that we set up a probe assembly and launch point on the moon. The space station has a shallower gravity well and a more forgiving landing/linkup point than the moon. In other words, it is an attempt to build a staging point for space research. That having been said, if it costs thousands per pound just for fuel to get away from the earth (and about half as much for fuel to land on the moon and relaunch it), how inexpensive will it be to build a semiconductor fab, ship pig-iron, build a machinist shop, have a full suite of materials testing and QA devices, etc etc etc lofted into space? For a long time to come, the most we can hope for is reusability and assembling things prebuilt and tested down here where everything's available and shipping costs are 1e5 cheaper.

    As for thasmudyan's belief that there's potentially a conspiracy to keep space travel expensive, I find all the kennedy-assassination theories more plausible. The cost of escaping earth's gravity is so high, you can pay an engineer for ten years and spend less than lofting him into space. There isn't a techie alive that wouldn't love to see those numbers brought down to a level that makes a week in space affordable. It matters to most of us much more than mere money ever could. Getting thousands of geeks to remain silent about ways to drop those costs would be impossible. Space travel remains expensive not out of a conspiracy, but simply because it is that hard, that iffy, that expensive.

    If you don't believe me, you don't understand the technical extremes we're talking about here. Check again the ongoing postmortem of Columbia's failed reentry, and imagine building any device (no matter how simple) that performs well under these extremes of heat and cold. If it seemed easy, find any 1 thing that performs well both immersed in liquid nitrogen and exposed to a blowtorch. Last of all, imagine building something complex enough to support life for days and still withstand those two thermal extremes, plus a thousand other issues like extreme acceleration forces, radiation, hard vacuum, repeated hot/cold cycling for anything going in/out of unfiltered sunlight, etc., etc., etc. This complexity is why we have the phrase "It isn't rocket science."

    -----

    Thankfully, the anti-nuke protest was modded down low enough I only saw responses. Hospitals and highway departments have nastier stuff than the 'nuclear batteries' used to power probes. If I were Roblimo, anyone saying 'chernyobl in space' without a new argument would immediately have all karma stripped. If I were king, they'd get flogged.

  • Too bloody late (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jnik ( 1733 ) on Thursday February 27, 2003 @10:43AM (#5395545)
    The whole point of PFF/PKE (Pluto Fast Flyby, renamed Pluto/Kuiper Express, and now renamed again) was to launch early enough and travel fast enough to get there before Pluto's atmosphere freezes. It's fairly likely this has already happened, and almost a certainty by the time the probe gets there. Shame this project got overlooked and delayed so many times, since next chance will be in about two hundred years.
  • ...who thought that 'Kuiper' was just a horrible way to spell 'Jupiter'?

  • ...the public will be as fascinated with the pictures...

    Better bring a flash. It's tough to tell the Sun from the other stars at that distance.

  • Wonder if in 12 years (when the probe is supposed to reach Pluto) the public will be as fascinated with the pictures coming back as much as with the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft.

    Well, the public was fascinated by Pioneer way back in the day, then they were fascinated by Voyager in the 80s and then in the '90s we were fascinated by Sojourner/Pathfinder, so yeah, we probably will be fascinated by PFF/PKE/whatever they're calling this thing right now. There's always a large portion of the populace that thinks space pictures are cool. Especially kids and nerds, and those will always be a large segment of the populace.
  • I hate to sound like one of those "all this money could be better spent on...." folks, but from a practical perspective, we really need a moonbase. It's an investment in future space exploration, like ISS is supposed to be, but with a purpose. Once we have a decent moonbase we should be able to launch planetary explorations much more frequently and for lower cost. Or so I've been told.
    • Let's see...

      To build a planetary probe you need to be able to build/extract/refine...

      • Rad-hardened chips and rather advanced circuitry
      • Radioisotopes (so you need uranium, which to the best of my knowledge has not been found in minable quantities on the moon).
      • All manner of complex alloys, plastics, and probably carbon composites (so, you want glass as well).
      • Propellant for rockets. There might be useful quantities of water down at the south pole, but it's a real bitch to get (at -238 Celsius or so). Alternatively, you might build a space elevator or an rail gun launcher, but they're both massive engineering projects.
      • Then, you need one hell of a machine shop to make the parts to very high precision, assemble, and test them, all of which will require highly skilled technicians for the foreseeable future.
      • You need mining operations to extract all these things (if you have to ship them from earth, you may as well build the probe on Earth). Carbon is very rare on the moon, so you might well need an asteroid mining operation to get it...

      Until the cost of getting off Earth gets much lower, the capital cost of launching all the equipment and personnel necessary to run the kind of moon base you're talking about is going to be so massive as to be beyond the discretionary resources of even the US government for a while.

  • Wonder if in 12 years (when the probe is supposed to reach Pluto) the public will be as fascinated with the pictures coming back as much as with the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft."

    This is coming from my astronomy professor at Cornell (who is a major NASA player, directing the Rover missions, etc). He says that Pioneer, while amazingly sucessful in terms of science, was never veyr sucessful to the public because it's camera were pretty crappy. They produced pictures that were not much better than the best ground-based telescopes of the day. Voyager capitalized on this and was given high-def cameras.
    Pictures are among the less important tools on those spacecraft (again, according to a prof), where the radiation scopes, temperature, etc are much more important.
    For a good example of this, look at the first probe to make it to Mars - Mariner 9 (9, right?). It finally reached Mars after years of failures, only to arrive during a global dust storm! The public interest was quickly wanned.

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