Small Breath of Life for Pluto Mission

Ghengis writes: "An update to this article posted back in March, the mission to send a probe to Pluto gets a reprieve from Congress. Timing is critical for studying Pluto's atmosphere, as it is about to ungergo a 200 year freeze when Pluto enters its long winter. There still isn't enough money to send a probe to Pluto, but the money could keep the mission alive long enough to get more money."

Comments

Re:A bit of a rush job?

[pubudu]

Surely it would be better to spend the funding on something a little more viable, and wait until Pluto is again defrosted?

200 year freeze. I, for one, would prefer not to wait that long.

Re:What is meant when...

[Rick the Red]

I'd rather we go back to the Moon first. There's nothing you can do on Mars that you can't do on the Moon, except study Mars. Plus, there are lots of things better done on the Moon than anywhere else, such as astronomy. Either place, if you go outside you die, so you'll need the same technology to colonize the Moon as you'll need to visit Mars. Why spend months in a ship traveling to a place where you must spend months in the same ship before you can then spend more months getting back home? What will you do on the way to/from Mars?

I'm not saying don't go to Mars, but for practical reasons we should colonize the Moon first. If we can't support a Lunar colony for 12 months, even with regular trips to/from Earth, then how can we support a mission to Mars?

Please stay away from non-sequiturs

[Spamalamadingdong]

The poster mentioned nothing about cleaning up Earth before going to space. It would be nice if you could keep your responses pertinent to the parent.

This Pluto mission is beginning to look a lot like our Halley mission: underfunded, behind the schedule set by Nature, and fated to be cancelled instead of launched. At that, the poster has a decent argument: research dollars are scarce enough that we should spend them on missions which will actually fly.

Not that I agree that this means we should bypass Pluto. On the contrary, I think we should gear up to go ASAP. Something like the DS-1 propulsion system, perhaps with improved concentrators, might do the trick; while nuclear is the natural choice for anything going that far from old Sol, I don't think we're going to see it. Heck, if these things can be done cheap enough we should launch two, or even three; redundancy never hurt anyone's chances.
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