Randy Cassingham's Blog

You already know I'm a space junkie. One of my former colleagues at JPL got a mission to Pluto up and running -- the only planet we haven't sent a probe to yet. It's tough these days to get probes built and launched, not because of technology but politics. A reporter once asked my friend "What is the most difficult part of the mission to Pluto?" He said that was easy: "the part from here to Washington." He was too right: the mission was canceled because, Washington says, at $800 million it was over budget. The problem was it wasn't really over budget: the final cost estimate was actually $496 million. Former NASA Administrator Dan Goldin admitted later that they needed $200 million extra for Mars missions, so they took it from Pluto, which killed that mission. After all, Mars is a sexier planet, in part because it will take so long to get to Pluto (nearly 10 years!)

But there's new hope: NASA requested proposals for a new mission to the Pluto-Charon dual planetary system, with a $500 million price cap (hmmmm, maybe they shouldn't have canceled the last one after all?!) In a development that I think is healthy, several teams bid for it, which helps drive costs down. A team led by the Boulder branch of the Southwest Research Institute won, and it includes a flyby of the unexplored Kuiper Belt just beyond Pluto.

I attended a very interesting briefing by the mission's Principal Investigator, Dr. Alan Stern. They're now at a critical stage: you guessed it, the government wants to cancel it again! The mission is conspicuously absent from the 2003 Bush budget. There are significant scientific reasons to study Pluto. Stern says: "Pluto-Charon itself is the also the only known binary planet, and has more complex seasons than either Earth or Mars. The Kuiper Belt is a region of the solar system where planetary accretion was arrested in mid-stride during the birth of the solar system, and we don't know why. Despite that, we do know it is a treasure trove for understanding planetary formation in much the same way that an archaeological dig tells us about ancient societies."

There are great reasons for getting going now: as Pluto moves away from the sun in its orbit, its atmosphere will freeze and fall as snow, and it won't be warm enough to revaporize it until Pluto gets close to the sun again, in about 200 years! Worse, because Pluto is tilted so far on its axis, as it gets further out more and more of its northern hemisphere will be shadowed. So if we want to SEE it within the next 200+ years, we must get going soon. Naturally, the project has a very cool web site. Another site lets you add your name to a petition to Congress to keep the project going. [Deleted from this posting.] To understanding the origins of our solar system is worth the cost: less than half the price of a B-2 bomber or, to bring it closer to home, about a quarter of what Americans spent on Easter candy this year. Join me in supporting the mission to Pluto.

The mission was indeed funded, and launched in 2006. Because of the support I showed for the mission, Principal Investigator Alan Stern invited me to the mission's launch. See my report on the launch to Pluto.