Funding Approved for Pluto/Kuiper Probe

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."

Comments

This is good news

[ODD97]

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

[anubi]

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.

12 years?

[mraymer]

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.

Re:12 years?

[$$$$$exyGal]

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

Budgets...

[Anonymous MadCoe]

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...

Re:Budgets...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, but NASA yearly budget is 15 billion. Pluto mission is just 3% of the total budget. Besides Pluto exploration gives much more scientific benefit than equally expensive manned flight.

Re:Budgets...

[Anonymous Coward]

$500 Mil was an estimation, some checking shoes that last year's budget for ferrari F1 was $390,- and yes this is the type of money we're talking about. McLaren and Williams are estimated to spend money in the same ballpark, ehich in that case is the combined spending for both the Cassis and engine development and running cost. Last year's Busget for Minardi was estimated at about $47 Million. Maybe it seems like ab it much to you, but that's how it is. NASCAR spends a fraction of this, but then again they are mot half as advanced in their technology.

don't want to go?

[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.)

AOL Poll

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

[$$$$$exyGal]

Bush quietly signed an omnibus bill last week, SPACE.com has learned.

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

--sex

Pluto not exciting...?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

Question...

[natron 2.0]

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.

Re:We dont' need a CHERYNOBL in space!

[FTL]

> Furthermore, plutonium is not the deadliest substance known. While a dangerous alpha-emitter if ingested, and an undeniably toxic heavy-metal, there are far more lethal substances. That honour AFAIK goes to VX nerve gas.

No need to compare plutonium with nerve gas. A better comparison would be caffeine. Yup, caffeine is more deadly than plutonium.

Ralph Nader made the claim that plutonium was the most toxic substance known. As the page linked to above says, "Dr. Bernard Cohen, went so far as to volunteer to eat as much plutonium as Ralph Nader would caffeine in an attempt to demonstrate the folly of the severe toxicity claims. Mr. Nader refused the challenge."

Re:say what?

[Tumbleweed]

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!

If we are even here in 12 years

[nurb432]

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.

A Theory

[NetGyver]

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.

Yep.

[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" 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

Re:Did I Read That Right

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.