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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.
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.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
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.
The fundemental problem with NASA is that they throw all their money into dead-ends like the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station (both projects are just for show and have yet to produce any tangible benefits), instead of focusing on the type of hard core science research that will make the Warp Drives and Transporters a reality before I'm too old to pass the Starfleet physical. If NASA doesn't get their ass in gear, I'm going to have to focus on my other calling as a Jedi Knight.
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It will be really interesting to see what sort of propulsion system they choose to get there, given the extraordinary distance that will have to be covered. I bet they'll choose some sort of ion-drive, or related thing.
Does anyone know how long it will take to reach Pluto? I would think a few years, but of course that's just a guesstimate.
We'll probably only ever get to see the one Pluto Probe get launched in the next 20 years, which is a shame, because redundancy is the best way to reduce cost/benefit ratios in a NASA mission.
The odds for a long duration mission like this to the far reaches of our solar system are pretty slim, and once you make one Pluto Probe it is a lot cheaper to make *many* Pluto Probes.
What do you think the odds are there will be even a Pluto II?
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
... 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 ...
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
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.
Kuiper belt is a lot more interesting though. NASA is downplaying it possibly because they will fit the craft mainly for pluto-charon system and won't be able to do much about the belt.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Is there someone who can explain the trajectory? There must be some sort of "window", (presumably, we're about to miss it) which won't reopen for hundreds of years, right?
If NASA starts concentrating on Pluto now, I can't imagine where the Mars Society crackpots will setup their formica space station to train for the planet's environment.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.)
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Some previous discussion of the trajectory issue here. The big lost opportunity for flybys was the "Grand Tour" 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.
I said Alan was an expert, not an authority. He knows quite a lot about Pluto. And there is a lot we can learn from Earth: we know it's mass (pretty well, to within around 5% or so), we know it has a large moon. We know it spins on its size, and that it has an atmosphere. We know it's orbit and we know that this orbit is in a 3:2 mean motion reasonance with Neptune. That's a fair number of facts right there (there are more). At that point, you can start to say a lot about Pluto and where it might or might not have come from.
But Alan Stern's word is not the final word on anything Pluto related. He, and any of us, is capable of being wrong. But he's known as more knowledgable than almost anyone else, making him an expert.
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.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Look, I said demonstrable benefits. Sure, Apollo had benefits, but try to convince Joe Taxpayer that it was worth all that money. If we had spent that money on some long-term goal, like fully-reusable orbiters or a permanent space station, we'd have something you could point to and say, "that is where your money went". Instead, we went with a project that created billions of dollars worth of use-once hardware, and wasn't the basis of any further accomplishments. A few useful but unsexy technical breakthroughs don't make up for that.
If you want laceless shoes and non-stick cooking, then I guess Apollo was a success. But if you want a solid foundation for further space exploration, Apollo was a total waste of money.
The Pluto-Kupier Express needs to be developed and launched soon. There are two main reasons for this: 1) The launch window for setting a trajectory for Pluto that uses Jovian gravity assist lies between 2004-2006. This could signifigantly shorten the time it takes the probe to reach Pluto which could significantly effect the next reason. 2) Pluto is currently heading away from the perihelion in its abort, thus is headed away from the Sun (and Earth). As Pluto heads away from the sun the surface temperature decreases and the atmosphere progressively condenses, freezing to the surface of the planet. Planetary scientist are very anxious to study its atmosphere in a gaseous state, it is predicted to be completetly frozen by 2020. As Pluto takes 248 years to revolve around the sun it will be a LONG time before it's gas again.
STOP ROCK VIDEO
...we need to get our monkey asses to Mars. Hell, there are Ghosts there(ghosts of mars), aliens(mission to mars), 4 titted prostitutes(total recall), humans with small people embedded in their chests(total recall), alien nuclear reactors, and all sorts of fun things to discover and enjoy. Why send another goddamn satellite out looking at other planets when we can party it up with martian meta-whores? Mr. Scientist needs to get out more.
Ask any priest, rabbi, reverand, etc, etc, etc...
:)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I think I'm missing something here... is this AC post remotely related to anything?
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A web site now exists at http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/
Pluto is not an asteroid according to any planetary scientist. Asteroids are rocky or metallic and found generally within 5 AU of the Sun. Pluto is icey and averages 40 AU from the Sun. It is generally agreed to be a Kuiper Belt Object and some of us, myself included, object to its status as a major planet. But it's not really a point we argue about much, because it doesn't matter.
However, being small doesn't make it uninteresting. Witness all the missions that flew to comet Halley. Or to Borelly. And to the asteroid Eros. Pluto (and the one or two other KBOs that New Horizons will visit) are examples of a population of bodies we have not yet been able to study. They provide valuable clues about the formation of out solar system and about its overall present nature.
In short, if you do a modicum of research, you come to realize that we are not going there because it is called 'planet'. We're going there because it is an interesting object.
On the other hand, the Europa mission probably won't fly even if New Horizons does not either. The current Europa mission is just too expensive. Congress has put a price cap on total outer solar system mission expenses of $1 billion. Right now, we can't do a Europa orbiter for less than $1.22 billion (figures from Colleen Hartmann, the new director of the Office of Space Science at NASA). We can't get Europa either way, so don't make it sound like it's even a choice. Perhaps in 5 years Europa will be more feasible, but it isn't now.