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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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)
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...
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."
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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.
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??
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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."
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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.
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