Atlas 5 Rocket Set to Launch Pluto Probe

tmerrill writes "An unprecedented mission to the outer edges of our solar system is set to launch in 4 days, despite a launch delay. From the article: 'NASA's first spacecraft to visit the planet Pluto is set to launch no earlier than Jan. 17 atop an Atlas 5 rocket on a decade-long trip to the fringe of the Solar System ... In order to reach Pluto by 2015, the $650 million New Horizons mission must lift off this month in order to swing by Jupiter for a gravity boost. The probe's 35-day launch window, however, stretches until Feb. 14. The launch window opens on Jan. 11. Inspections of the probe's Atlas 5 booster prompted mission managers to push their launch target to no earlier than Jan. 17, NASA officials said.'" The New York Times has details as well.

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[eldavojohn]

I should start by saying that there's a wealth of information out online about Lockheed Martin's Atlas V.

The article gave a link to www.space.com but if you want the source of this information, you should go to Spaceflight Now for their informative diagrams. You can get an idea of how the vehicle actually breaks apart to deliver its payload. You can read about how they plan to retrieve the boosters from the ocean, the simulated views of onboard cameras, or previous Atlas launches. This site contains for more information than the one listed in the article.

If you're interested in payload sizes, check out Wikipedia's entries on this topic or the International Launch Service's documentation of preparation for Atlas V launches.

The mission

[Bad D.N.A.]

Info on the mission can be found at:
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

Re:Where's the obvious reply?

[Anonymous Coward]

Atlas 5 Rocket Set to Probe Uranus.

Re:Where's the obvious reply?

[Scarletdown]

That joke works a little better if it is worded, "How come no one posted about probing Uranus?"

And bring on the Futurama quotes now...

Atlas V is a p*ssy rocket

[spineboy]

Atlas V generates a peak 4 meganewton thrust. The old Saturn V(apollo booster) generated up to 35MN, and could deliver up to 120,000 pounds into low Earth orbit.

Sigh... were the Moon landings a technological feat, never to be duplicated?

Re:Atlas V is a p*ssy rocket

[flyingsquid]

Atlas V generates a peak 4 meganewton thrust. The old Saturn V(apollo booster) generated up to 35MN, and could deliver up to 120,000 pounds into low Earth orbit. Sigh... were the Moon landings a technological feat, never to be duplicated?

The moon landings were primarily a result of a Cold War need to upstage the Soviets, and not some great fascination with technology and engineering on the part of the White House. Now that the USSR is history, there's no longer that same justification for moon shots or similar stunts.

And who cares how big the rocket is? Apollo did make some important discoveries about the geology of the moon. But I think sending people back to the moon for a photo op is vastly less interesting than strapping a tiny rover atop of a small booster and sending it to look for life on Mars. These modest, unmanned missions are where all the real science is.

Re:Atlas V is a p*ssy rocket

[LurkerXXX]

And who cares how big the rocket is?

With a SaturnV you coud send a rover big enough that it wouldn't get hung up in 6" of sand like one of the Mars Rovers did. You could send a lot more instrumentation up to examine more aspects of whatever you are looking at.

There are other uses for big rockets than just sending humans into space.

Re:Atlas V is a p*ssy rocket

[4D6963]

Mod parent up

It is to be regretted that 40 years ago we had a rocket more powerful than any of the ones we got now. Actually I've been quite surprised to hear that we had nothing as powerful as a Saturn V, it's like, going technologically backwards, although if you look at the problem from close, we were lucky not to have any problem with Saturn V's and the context was much different (and allowed such gigantic rockets to be invested in).

And yeah as you said, big rockets like Saturn V ain't all about manned missions, they could be about sending much bigger probes. Who knows, if we had tried to develop really more powerful rockets, maybe we could have sent a probe to Pluto with some much energy in it to slow down enough to get in orbit around Pluto, but you can imagine anything that you could send to space with bigger rockets.

Btw, as for Bush's plan to return to the Moon, are we going to have to make rockets as powerful as the Saturn V?

Re:Atlas V is a p*ssy rocket

[m50d]

Sigh... were the Moon landings a technological feat, never to be duplicated?

There was no great technological achievement. The saturn V is a demonstration that if you throw enough money at it, you can usually do what you want. Price/performance the atlas has it beat by probably an order of magnitude.

Re:Atlas V is a p*ssy rocket

[corngrower]

From what I understand, you are correct. The Atlas is very lightwieght for the amount of payload it sends up. This is because the design is based on the fact that a pressurized pop can can support far more weight than an unpressurized pop can. The fuel & oxidizer tanks of the Atlas are pressurized, allowing the booster to be very light weight but still be able to support a substantial payload. Saturn V didn't use this design.

Re:Atlas V is a p*ssy rocket

[Waffle Iron]

This is because the design is based on the fact that a pressurized pop can can support far more weight than an unpressurized pop can.

The balloon tanks were cool, but they're not used on the Atlas V:

The newest version of Atlas, the Atlas V, is an Atlas in name alone as it contains little Atlas technology. It no longer uses balloon tanks nor 1.5 staging, but incorporates a rigid framework for its first stage booster much like the Titan family of vehicles.

You call THAT a rocket, Gringo?

[PoconoPCDoctor]

While an impressive vehicle, it's size is dwarfed by the Saturn V.

I called in sick to my job and flew down to Cape Kennedy to see the last launch of this monster. The last launch was used to put Skylab in orbit.

I got no closer than about Titusville, (I think this was about 10 miles from the launch pad) but when that sucker was lifting off, I felt a sonic impact that felt like someone slammed my chest!

Probe lucky to be. Race against time.

[Tablizer]

This probe was cancelled and reinstated multiple times. One congress committe would cancel it and the next one would reinstate it. One reason it finally went thru is that Pluto's atmosphere will soon freeze into nitrogen snow when it gets further from the sun because of Pluto's lopsided orbit. There will not be an opportunity to see the snow turn (melt) back into an atmosphere for something like 250 years from now. Thus, it is now or never. Other planets and moons can wait, but Pluto's atmosphere cannot.

Re:Probe lucky to be. Race against time.

[99luftballon]

Nothing concentrates the mind like the thought of a useless mission. Missing this opportunity would be crime. The Pluto may also provide an opportunity to solve a question that's been vexing many; should Pluto even be counted as a planet or just a small body as part of the Kuiper belt.

Re:Probe lucky to be. Race against time.

[Tablizer]

may also provide an opportunity to solve a question that's been vexing many; should Pluto even be counted as a planet or just a small body as part of the Kuiper belt.

Frankly, spending 800 million USD to figure out how to classify a body is probably not worth it by iself. However, knowing if and why there is a difference between Pluto and other Kuiper objects is definitely a worthy goal.

Here is more info on the probe's problematic political history:

http://space.com/spacenews/businessmonday_041004.h tml

http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/advocac y_and_education/pluto/pluto_campaign_timeline.html

The stolen "nuke tape" fiasco at the Los Alamos National Laboraty almost delayed or reduced the delivery of the radioactive power cell. I've read later that they met their goal eventually.

Why Pluto?

[jcaldwel]

Shouldn't we be spending our limited budget on something more interesting, like Europa, Ganymede or Titan? They should be easier to get to, from their distance.

Re:Why Pluto?

[SB5]

Those moons would be nice, but Pluto is at an ideal distance. That and the fact that in space distance matters squat, if you travel 100 million miles at 20,000 miles per hour, according to what I know of basic physics without ever taking a physics class is that the probe 100 million miles later will still be travelling 20,000 miles per hour. Europa, Ganymede and Titan, we can get to probably in a shorter time but missions for those are probably on the drawing board with the problems we have learned from visiting Mars.

But I am not a rocket scientist, and I don't think you are either. All the planets in the solar system are pretty damn interesting if you look at each one individually.

Re:Why Pluto?

[Tablizer]

Shouldn't we be spending our limited budget on something more interesting, like Europa, Ganymede or Titan? They should be easier to get to, from their distance.

1. Pluto's atmosphere is going to freeze into ground snow pretty soon due to its odd orbit and we won't get another chance for 200 or so years to study the atmosphere. Europa won't be different any time soon.

2. We've never had a probe explore pluto before, unlike the moons you mentioned.

3. The probe is planned to explore other Kuiper-belt objects after pluto. The Kuiper-belt objects are generally a mystery. (Some inner moons may be captured Kuiper-belt objects, but we won't know for sure until we compare them to the real deal.)

$650M to go to Pluto?

[Robert Heinich]

Can anyone provide what the costs of other probes have been? (Even know the cost of putting up a weather satellite would help.) The New Horizon probe is costing $634,146 a pound which seems to me a tad expensive.

Re:$650M to go to Pluto?

[Tablizer]

Can anyone provide what the costs of other probes have been?

Examples:

Cassini/Hyugens - About 3 billion USD, some of it by Europe.

MER Mars rovers - $850 million total

Viking landers - 2 billion total, probably 4 billion adjusted for inflation.

It is generally on the low-end of probe costs. However, NASA has cut back of late and most planetary missions are between about $400 million to $800 million these days. The reasoning given is that technology and experience has allowed for less expensive probes.

I don't want to start a holy war here, but

[sgladfelter]

what is the deal with you Atlas V fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of an Atlas V for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to lift a 17k lb. payload off the ground and into low earth orbit. 20 minutes. At home, on my Saturn V, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this rocket, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that. In addition, during this launch, the flight control system will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this. I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various atlas rockets, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Lockheed Martin ICBM that has run faster than its Marshall Center counterpart, despite the atlas' faster propellant system architecture. My 4.44 caliber potato gun with 8 kPa of pressure runs faster than this rocket at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Atlas V is a superior machine. Atlas addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use an atlas over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Outer Solar system exploration

[lobotomir]

Apart from being a part of the nuclear spring, is it possible that this particular New Horizons mission gets funding in order to gather information about the Pioneer anomaly?

$650 million? What a waste!

[Jafafa Hots]

Why, with all that money we could have afforded over a three-thousandth of an Iraq war!