New Horizons Pluto mission - they need a lander

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becarlson

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http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/<br /><br />Seems like such a waste to spend 10 years getting to Pluto, to fly past at 50,000 mph. Why not land something there in order to return a mountain of more useful data?
 
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Leovinus

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We'll be lucky to get a flyby. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>
 
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bobvanx

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Plus, then we'd have to listen to all the nitwits:<br /><br />"Why are the pictures so crappy?"<br />"My Wal*Mart camera takes better pictures!"<br />"Feh... another frozen wasteland"<br />"This is a conspiracy because we don't see Charon in the sky"<br />"It cost us 5.6 billion dollars to find out that Pluto is <i>cold?</i>"
 
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tap_sa

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Decelerating from that 50000 mph might be pretty challenging, an ion engine might work but still...
 
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astrophoto

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Their website lists a launch data of Jan 2006 - is this still planned? How far along in development are they with this package?<br /><br />I am never up for killing a worthy project, I just know we have recently 'refocused' our efforts with Bush's space vision and wonder if this one got cut?
 
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mrmorris

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<font color="yellow">"Decelerating from that..."</font><br /><br /><font color="orange">Decelerate!?!?</font> What for? We'll just hyphenate the mission: New Horizons -- Deep Impact II<br /><br /><img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" />
 
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thalion

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I remember a long time ago--and I mean, like five or six years ago--they were talking about breaking a Pluto flyby mission into two parts: a main bus and a smaller sub-probe that would image Pluto from the opposite side to maximize coverage. That obviously went the way of all flesh.<br /><br />I wouldn't mind an Deep Impact-style impactor with imaging equipment, though I'm betting it would need to be quite "fast" to maximize data collection before crashing. A true lander is not practical--think of the tremendous amount of fuel it would take to slow down enough to orbit, let alone land on such a small body without taking a very slow trajectory. A Hohmann transfer would take decades; I love Pluto, but even I don't think the data return from such a mission would be enough to justify the wait and expense of a lander or orbiter. Let's see what New Horizons finds, first.
 
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centsworth_II

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What about that possibility of studying one or more Kuiper belt objects after a Pluto flyby? <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>
 
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bobvanx

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>>two parts<br /><br />A battery powered smaller probe, released a few weeks ahead of encounter (like Huygens!) would be an awesome tool for getting a full map of the system. Just enough power to communicate back to the main craft, with well-chosen instrumentation our science return could increase by 30%, surely!<br /><br />Since Pluto/Charon orbit every... 6 days? ...that means the best pictures of at least part of the orbs will be taken from 7,000,000 miles away*. That seems nutty. I know there is alot more to science that returning images, sure, but suppose there is something fundamentally odd about the parts we don't see, that we need to understand to finish the story?<br /><br />A current example would be Iapetus' ridge. Voyager missed it. <br /><br />(*At opposition, Mars is about 35 million miles away. If you look at it through a moderately good 'scope, you can see the polar caps. New Horizons is unlikely to carry even that much resolving power, so even at 5x closer for those parts that will then rotate out of view, surface features will not be resolved).
 
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becarlson

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It definately would be cool to get a lander on Pluto to sample the soil, take some high-res photos, etc. But, I think we all know the possibility of the New Horizons team adding a lander has a probability nearing 0%.
 
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vogon13

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Huge rocket burn needed to decelerate from 50000 kph, like bigger than what launched it in first place. Sounds like a job for Prometheus. I think if you go through all the SDC posts, we have uses for a fleet of about 112 Prometheus spacecraft so far. Going to have to wheedle and cajole congress big time for all this. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#ff0000"><strong>TPTB went to Dallas and all I got was Plucked !!</strong></font></p><p><font color="#339966"><strong>So many people, so few recipes !!</strong></font></p><p><font color="#0000ff"><strong>Let's clean up this stinkhole !!</strong></font> </p> </div>
 
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sky5000

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There is no cheap/easy way to do it this time. Titan was easier because it has a thick atmosphere - so you can use heat shield/parachute to decelerate. You would need huge rockets to decelerate/land, and even bigger ones to get there - very expensive. NH will fly past Pluto at a huge speed - but it will be doing useful science for weeks before/after, because we know so little about Pluto. Better to just keep going, and have a shot at some more KBOs & maybe the heliopause.. <br /><br /><br />See:<br />http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/<br /> <br />The mission is a "cheap" one at around $600 million. Apparantly they are in a real race against time to make the Jan 2006 launch window - there was a hitch at Los Alamos where they make the RTGs - Plutonium 238 is currently very hard to get hold of & they might not have enough by launch date. Shame they are not funding a "cheap" copycat 2007-8 NH-2 mission which could swing by Jupiter,Uranus & a few more KBOs including a nice double system..<br /><br />The normal sequence of exploration seems to be:<br /><br />1) flyby (Mariner 1-8&10, Voyager..)<br />2) orbiter (Mariner-9, Galileo,Cassini..)<br />3) static lander/probe (Viking, Ranger, Huygens..)<br />4) Rover (MERs,Apollo..)<br /><br /><br />
 
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sky5000

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Yeh deceleration from 20000 km/h to 0 in 1 second - that would be fun.. No-ones figured out how to do useful lithobraking yet - most of the sort of delicate stuff (hi-gain antenea, RTGs..) needed could not survive such an impact.<br /><br />Orbital insertion/landing for a very very distant airless body like Pluto is a headache - you have to go there fast to do the mission in any decent length of time, and yet you need to decelerate quite fast once there - especially if its a body with a small gravity well, like Pluto.. Ion drives are too slow, chemical rockets too heavy..<br /><br />The gas giants have enough gravity to make it a bit easier to stay with the target once there, and an atmosphere to help with aerobraking... <br />
 
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