Pluto Mission Falls Victim to Cost-Cutting

Citing ballooning costs, NASA officials have ordered an immediate work stoppage on a major mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, postponing for at least several years the world’s first voyage to Pluto.

The nearly $500-million Pluto-Kuiper Express mission had been scheduled to launch in December 2004 and reach Pluto by 2012. National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials now say they hope to launch at the end of the decade and reach the planet--which is usually the farthest planet from the sun--by 2020.

But there was disagreement among scientists over whether Pluto will be too far away by then to yield any valuable data.

“NASA is committed to completing the reconnaissance of the solar system,” said Douglas Stetson, manager of solar system exploration for JPL.

While the decision to postpone the Pluto voyage is disheartening to the 50 members of the mission team, they will not face layoffs, according to JPL. Instead, they will be redeployed to other missions. “There’s no shortage of work,” Stetson said.

The news was particularly crushing for planetary scientists, who were eager to study Pluto and its atmosphere while it is close to the sun.

In its 248-year elliptical orbit, Pluto ranges from 2.8 billion to 4.6 billion miles from the sun. Currently near Neptune, Pluto is warm enough that its atmosphere is not frozen and can be studied.

According to JPL planetary scientist Ellis D. Miner, waiting until 2020 runs the risk of encountering the planet with an atmosphere so frozen it has fallen to the planet’s surface as snowflakes.

“We wanted to get to Pluto and catch it in 2012 before it gets too far away from the sun,” he said. “If we miss that opportunity we have to wait--for over 200 years.”

Robert M. Nelson, also a planetary scientist at JPL, concurs: “This is a loss because there was an opportune moment to do this.”

Nelson and Miner are officials of the Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences, a 1,200-member group urging that the mission be carried out as originally scheduled if it can be funded without cutting other missions. Curiosity about Pluto grew in 1996 when the Hubble space telescope discovered light and dark splotches coating the planet’s surface.

“We only know enough about Pluto to whet our appetites,” Miner said. “It’s a high priority because we don’t even have good initial exploration data.”

Pluto, he said, could be as interesting as Neptune’s moon Triton, which was surprisingly active when the Voyager probe flew by in 1989. Despite temperatures near absolute zero, the moon spit plumes of gas upward for more than a mile.

Stetson countered that some scientists believe there is a chance that Pluto’s atmosphere would be intact in 2020 and could still be studied by the spacecraft. He said that was a major reason NASA would try to launch a mission by the end of the decade and not wait until 2014, when the spacecraft could get a gravity-assisted boost from Jupiter.

In addition to studying Pluto’s atmosphere, the mission is scheduled to map and image the little-known planet’s geology and probe the Kuiper Belt, a collection of the icy planetesimals at the edge of the solar system. Studying the primitive material that makes up the planet could help explain the origin of the solar system and Earth’s earliest days, Stetson said.

The reason to postpone the mission is a financial one. The Pluto mission had been lumped with two others--an orbiter to Neptune’s moon Europa, where scientists hope to find liquid water, and a probe going closer to the sun than any previous spacecraft.

In two years, the cost of the three missions swelled from $1 billion to $1.6 billion. Most of the increases came from costs outside of NASA. The price of launching the Pluto mission on a Boeing Delta II rocket, for example, rose from $95 million to $140 million, Stetson said. The cost of a nuclear power source, prepared by the Department of Energy to fuel the spacecraft, saw similar inflation.

Ed Weiler, NASA’s associate administrator for space science, decided to spare the solar probe and the Europa mission, in part because scientists say it may represent the best hope of finding evidence of life elsewhere in the universe.

He said he hoped to find better ways to accomplish the Pluto mission and said advances in space propulsion might speed the time required for a spacecraft to cross billions of miles of space.

The decision is indirect fallout from NASA’s loss of two missions to Mars last year. NASA officials have decided that their “faster, better, cheaper” approach led to too much cost-cutting, so they have boosted spending on projects. The increased spending means that fewer projects overall can be funded.

Weiler’s decision is another in a long line of insults to Pluto, which at two-thirds the size of Earth’s moon is considered the runt of the solar system.

Last year, some astronomers suggested stripping Pluto of full planethood, calling it a “minor planet” or, worse, a “trans-Neptunian object.” The proposal led to much debate over how a planet is defined and some surprisingly emotional debates about the status of the small, rocky world.

“Everybody has sympathy for the little guy,” Nelson said.