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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."
Did Congress have to force money on NASA? It must be the last sign. I'm going to the bomb shelter.
Brought to you by the Artificial Idea Factory.
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
.: Max Romantschuk
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?
The emperor is naked.
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.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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.)
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.
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
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Because we're not running a nuclear reactor, we don't need any fancy machinery around the radioactive core, and so it can be embedded in extremely tough materials. This stuff makes a black-box recorder look flimsy. The worst damage the plutonium core could do to someone if the rocket exploded on launch would be to land on their head.
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.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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.
If you study the engineering behind the radiation sources that the spacecraft use you would see that the darkest of scenarios have been accounted for. Even if the launch vehicle were to explode high in the atmosphere, nothing would happen to the power supply.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
This mission should be shut down through peaceful protests before we all end up glowing green.
This concern is understandable, but uninformed. Refer to this page for a technical explanation of the problem and its solution. There is also a wealth of information here.
I, personally, am more concerned about nuclear-powered Cold War-era spy satellites still orbiting Earth than I am about a 21th-century-technology vehicle to be launched far, far away.
Hello , troll :-)
I was going to go into a long-winded rebuttal of your arguments, but then just did a quick search and copied and pasted the results here.
(And I would have thought that a "CHERNOBYL in space!" would have been the best place to have one, seeing as there's nobody there.)
Seeya!
"The ceramic-form plutonium fuel is heat resistant, thus making it more difficult to be vaporized in case of fire or reentry environmental exposure. The fuel is also very insoluble. It has a low chemical reactivity and breaks in large pieces, not small parts that can be inhaled or ingested. Unlike in nuclear accidents, RTGs cannot explode because no fusion or fission processes are occurring. Hence, the acute radiation sickness associated with nuclear explosions wont be witnessed in an RTG accident."
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Oh the horror: nuclear atoms in space! Probably those nasty hadron-based ones to boot! The entire space can be polluted forever!
This is as serious as those huge deadly pools of dihydrogen monoxide!
We must act now! Help save space! No muclear atoms in space!
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.
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.
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
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.
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 and here about these..... (Rudimentary googling, I am no expert)
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 and here
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
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."
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
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!
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.)
Not to mention that we've already had an RTG hit the atmosphere at 25,000 mph when the Apollo 13 LEM re-entered, resulting in millions of deaths and global radioactive contamination. Oh sorry, I forgot, it didn't, did it?
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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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.
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.
Thats right, I'm here to give Pitr a run for his money.
evilmoe
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.
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
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:
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. (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.
That aside, I hate space exploration. I want our problems solved first.
Yeah, because nothing useful
has ever come
from space 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 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.
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
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.
-- Find the Truth...
Even so, the chances of the generator vaporizing over a city are zero.
1. Launch vehicles are destroyed by remote control if they stray outside of a mathematically-defined "cone" around their planned flight-path. This is always going to be at least several hundred miles away from any sizable population.
2. There's no launch vehicle destruction scenario that is anywhere near violent enough to damage an RTG casing enough to release radioactivity. Possibly striking the ground at thousands of miles per hour would do it - but no launch vehicle travels at that speed at any altitude anywhere near the ground. They get up pretty high before they accellerate to that speed, and if they turn around and point the wrong direction (down) for any reason, they're destroyed - no rocket=no thrust, no thrust=no high velocity impact. The casings for these things are tested in impact tests with rocket sleds slamming into concrete walls at hundreds, even thousands of miles per hour, and they survive intact.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.