Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) -- NASA plans to launch a piano-sized spacecraft next month on a decade-long, 4.7-billion-mile journey to Pluto in what will be the U.S. space agency's first-ever mission to the most distant planet in the solar system.
The agency's New Horizons spacecraft is scheduled to take off aboard an Atlas V rocket from Launch Complex 41 at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, during a 35-day period beginning Jan. 17. It's scheduled to arrive at Pluto for a five- month study in July 2015.
New Horizon's seven scientific instruments will examine Pluto's surface, its geology, its composition and atmosphere. No spacecraft has ever visited the planet and the Hubble Space Telescope can't even see details of its icy, rocky surface. The probe will come within 6,200 miles of Pluto and should be able to take images of features as small as 200 meters across.
``We're going to be like kids in a candy shop when we arrive at a system like this,'' said Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, the principal investigator for the mission, in a televised briefing with reporters from NASA headquarters in Washington today.
It will be the first planetary mission for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration since the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took off in August. In 2004, a NASA spacecraft began orbiting Saturn, two robotic rovers landed on Mars and a mission to Mercury was launched.
Charon
The mission, which will cost about $700 million, is part of President George W. Bush's $12 billion plan for the U.S. space program. The plan calls for deeper robotic exploration of the solar system as a stepping stone to launch human voyages to the planets. Astronomers say studying other planets and moons can help scientists understand how life began on Earth.
Pluto, which was discovered in 1930, lies about 3.67 billion miles from the sun, or 40 times farther from the sun than Earth. It has three moons -- Charon, which was discovered by ground-based astronomers in 1978, and two other satellites found earlier this year in an analysis of images from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Astronomers debate whether Pluto is actually a planet and how big a sun-orbiting object has to be before it is considered a world. Its status was called into question earlier this year with the discovery of a possible 10th planet.
The 1,054-pound, 7-foot-tall spacecraft will first fly to Jupiter in February 2007, coming four times closer to the solar system's largest planet than the Cassini probe that passed by on its way to Saturn in 2004.
Kuiper Belt
New Horizons will also be the first-ever mission to the Kuiper Belt, a region of rocky, icy objects including Pluto orbiting the sun beyond Neptune that scientists believe may contain some of the original elements that led to the formation of life.
After its visit to Pluto, pending approval of an extended mission, New Horizons may travel deeper into the Kuiper Belt to search for objects as big as 60 miles across that might have an atmosphere and moons.
The voyage is the first in NASA's New Frontiers program, which funds missions costing less than $700 million to launch that study the top solar system exploration priorities laid out by the National Research Council in a 2002 study, including studies of asteroids and comets and a continued search for planets outside the solar system.
A second mission, Juno, that would conduct the first in- depth study of Jupiter, is being planned for launch no later than June 2010.
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Originally Posted by DesertWar
