NASA eyeing Pluto mission

Agency commissions study on feasibility of dwarf planet project

Four years after a spacecraft flew past Pluto, sending stunning images and data back to Earth, NASA has commissioned a study to explore spending even more time examining the dwarf planet.

The San Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute announced Wednesday it had received funding from NASA to study the feasibility and cost of a possible future Pluto orbiter mission.

The study will build on the success of the agency’s New Horizons mission, a space probe that launched in 2006. It was the first of its kind to get a close look at Pluto and its five moons, about 3 billion miles from Earth.

The Southwest Research Institute was part of the team that built that spacecraft, which is still exploring the farthest reaches of our solar system, having flown by Ultima Thule — a rock located a billion miles beyond Pluto that is found in the solar system’s Kuiper Belt — in January.

“We’re going to be using lots of the same people, lots of the same technology and really building on that, putting more instruments on it, and instead of flying past Pluto, stop and hanging out for two Earth years,” said Carly Howett, who is leading the study for the Southwest Research Institute.

NASA is providing $150,000 to the institute for the study, one of 10 different mission studies the agency is sponsoring to prepare for the next Planetary Science Decadal Survey, which outlines recommendations for space and ground-based exploration 10 years into the future. The results of these studies will be delivered to the National Academy Planetary Decadal Study that will begin in the summer of 2020.

When New Horizons launched in 2006, it became the first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, also known as the solar system’s “third zone,” according to NASA. The belt is a grouping of icy bodies just outside Neptune’s orbit where Pluto is found.

Its flyby of Pluto in 2015 provided both breathtaking images and data that have helped scientists gain new in

sights about the dwarf planet and its moons.

That data piqued Howett’s interest and sparked the idea of an orbiter mission to answer questions about Pluto’s unique and mysterious characteristics, hopefully with even higher-resolution images.

The New Horizons spacecraft carried only a limited payload, and many aspects of examining Pluto require different kinds of instrumentation that only an orbiter can provide. This could include radar to measure the thickness of the ice on the planet’s surface, as well as lidar to measure its topography.

“We’ve got different instruments, so we’d be able to look at the heat flow, the activity and trying to really get a grip on whether Pluto does have a subsurface ocean — is it possible Pluto could be supporting life? Those big science questions, this mission’s going to be able to address,” Howett said.

A new Pluto orbiter could also determine the extent of organic molecules on the planet, which New Horizons hinted at in its findings.

Howett and her team will spend three weeks in a NASA-designed laboratory to figure out the trajectory and payload capacity of a new spacecraft and how long it would be able to spend in Pluto’s orbit.

“We’re looking forward to getting into the nitty-gritty of this mission and seeing how feasible it is and what a mission like this could really look like,” she said.

A new Pluto mission could also provide further clarity on its status, after it was relegated to the status of dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union in 2006. During a presentation at a conference in Washington last week, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine made clear he still considered Pluto to be a planet.

Howett declined to wade into the argument, calling Pluto “a world” even though she was always taught it was indeed a planet.

“The pressure’s so high on both sides of this (argument),” she said. “I think it’s just a really interesting world that I’m very excited to go explore.”