U.S. May Still Get a Shot at Pluto Mission

Hopes for a mission to Pluto, canceled by NASA officials for budget reasons weeks ago, are rising again with a senator’s new vow to find money to pay for the trip.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), who heads the appropriations subcommittee controlling the NASA budget, called the $500-million mission a bargain and said that canceling it would be missing a historic opportunity.

She made her comments this week as NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe offered NASA’s 2003 budget to her committee.

Mikulski said she was disappointed to see a flat $15-billion NASA budget and continued cost overruns at the International Space Station. The agency should be spending more money to improve space shuttle safety, repair an aging launch infrastructure and conduct additional space missions--including the one to Pluto--Mikulski said.

A mission to Pluto--the only unexplored planet in the solar system--has been a repeated victim of the NASA budget. In the fall of 2000, a JPL mission to explore Pluto and the distant Kuiper Belt was canceled after its cost doubled to $800 million. The same year, NASA made plans to travel to Pluto for $500 million but canceled funding the next year.

After a massive letter-writing campaign mounted by supporters of the mission, including schoolchildren, and a push to restore a mission to Pluto by the Pasadena-based Planetary Society, Congress added $30 million to NASA’s 2002 budget at the last minute. The funds were earmarked for the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, in Mikulski’s home state, to continue planning the mission.

This year, the lab needs $122 million to start building the spacecraft, but the budget offers nothing. The only hope for the mission now is for Congress to restore the funding, which Mikulski said she would do. “She doesn’t want to miss the boat, or in this case, the rocket,” said her spokeswoman, Amy Hagovsky.

“We’re the undead,” said Alan Stern, a Pluto expert at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who is the project’s lead scientist. Though relieved by the news, Stern said the mission will be touch and go until the budget is finalized this year.

Still, his team is continuing to push forward with engineering and design of the spacecraft and mission. “We can’t be tentative about this,” he said. “It’s 44 months to launch.”

The scientists are racing to launch by 2006 because that is the last time for a decade they will be able to use Jupiter’s gravity to boost the spacecraft toward Pluto. They would like to reach the planet, about 3 billion miles away, by 2020.

Pluto is moving farther from the sun and many scientists think its atmosphere may freeze completely and be unavailable for study after 2020, though the timing is still being debated.

Stern also said that Pluto’s extreme tilt means that one hemisphere will be in total darkness and unavailable for imaging if a spacecraft does not reach it soon.

NASA officials said recently that they did not think a 2006 launch was possible because it can take up to eight years to get approval to launch spacecraft that use plutonium to power their electronics.

Stern also said his team was developing a backup plan to launch in 2007 and “go direct” without using Jupiter. After that, he said the planetary lineup would make the trip impossible without a new kind of propulsion system.