Possible Return to Pluto

NASA has recently announced that they’ll be sponsoring nine mission studies, one of them being a wide range study into a Pluto orbiter mission. The agency has funded the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to carry out the research. SwRI led NASA’s New Horizon’s mission which zoomed past Pluto in July 2015, taking the first ever close ups of the dwarf planet. The mission revealed a complex world with 3.2 kilometre high mountains of water ice and massively extensive plains of nitrogen ice among other things. The second fly by was conducted on January 1^st, 2019 of a small Kuiper Belt object, MU69, otherwise known as Ultima Thule.

Carly Howett, the study team leader at SwRI said in a statement, “We are excited to have this opportunity to inform the decadal survey deliberations with this study. Our mission concept is to send a single spacecraft to orbit Pluto for two Earth years before breaking away to visit at least one KBO and one other KBO dwarf planet.” They have been working on its orbiter concept for a while.

The survey is performed every ten years by the U.S. National Research Council to help NASA’s robotic exploration priorities. The work is set to begin in 2020.

New Horizons is in good condition and has fuel to fly by yet another KBO if NASA grants a mission extension as reported by Alan Stern, SwRI’s principal investigator of the New Horizon’s mission.