New Horizons To Launch With Min Amount of Pu-238

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New Horizons Set To Launch With Minimum Amount of Plutonium<br /><br />By Brian Berger<br />Space News Staff Writer<br /><br />WASHINGTON -- NASA is still targeting a January 2006 launch of the New Horizons Pluto probe after the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) confirmed it can deliver most of the nuclear fuel the spacecraft will need for its 10-year mission. A post-mission encounter with Pluto’s mysterious Kuiper Belt neighbors, however, appears a likely casualty of the plutonium pinch.<br /><br />NASA had considered postponing the New Horizons launch a full year due to a plutonium-238 shortage exacerbated by a security-related shutdown of the DOE lab that processes the radioactive material. The spacecraft will use the plutonium in a radioisotope thermal generator (RTG), a long-lived nuclear battery. RTGs transform heat from decaying plutonium pellets into electricity to power science instruments, computers and other flight systems.<br /><br />Postponing the launch would have added three to five years to the probe’s transit time and millions of dollars to the mission’s cost.<br /><br />With work halted at the DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory following a security breach, processing of NASA’s plutonium order has fallen far behind schedule. The department recently completed its investigation into the mishandling of classified information at the New Mexico nuclear weapons lab. Sensitive work is expected to resume there shortly. Los Alamos had about half of the plutonium-238 that NASA needs for New Horizons ready to go when the lab was shut down in July.<br /><br />The spacecraft is in the middle of assembly at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., where it has already been outfitted with two of its three scientific instruments. The spacecraft still must undergo months of testing. It is scheduled to be shipped to Kennedy Space Center in late 2005 to be readied for <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>