Team tapped to design Pluto probe

Artist's concept of the Pluto-Kuiper Belt Express

By Richard Stenger
CNN Sci-Tech

(CNN) -- Giving a boost to an imperiled mission, NASA this week gave approval for a scientific team to draft a design of a robot ship to study Pluto, the only planet that has not received a visit from a manmade probe.

The proposed Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission has narrowly avoided the ax amid severe cutbacks at NASA, which is reeling from billions of dollars in cost overruns from the international space station.

But space enthusiasts have championed the expedition to the bizarre world, which boasts an eccentric orbit, seasonal atmosphere and mysterious ice moon.

"This mission is of enormous public interest and we look forward to working with them from here to the edge of the solar system," said Louis Friedman, director of the Planetary Society, which organized a grass-roots campaign to save the project.

The probe, which could launch as early as 2006, still faces serious hurdles. Project development depends on the availability of funds. Congress approved $30 million in seed money for 2002, but whether it delivers more after then is uncertain.

Moreover, whether NASA can send the probe all the way to Pluto without spending a fortune remains technically questionable.

Still, mission scientists are ecstatic that the Pluto-Kuiper Belt Express has gotten this far.

"This mission is likely to rewrite textbooks regarding the origins of the planets (and) the nature of the outer solar system," said Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute.

NASA tapped the San Antonio, Texas-based institute to work with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, to design the probe and its instruments and figure out a price tag for the mission.

If launched in 2006, the probe could reach Pluto as early as 2016, planetary scientists estimate.

Time is of the essence. The planet is currently heading away from the sun and its tenuous atmosphere could be in the process of freezing solid. It might be well more than a century before it thaws out again, according to astronomers.

Besides studying Pluto's atmosphere, the probe would map the surface and record temperatures on both Pluto and its moon Charon.

After the Pluto-Charon flyby, the probe would examine even more distant objects in a ring of primordial comets.

"The Kuiper Belt is an archeological dig into the early history of our solar system," said Andrew Cheng, a project scientist with NASA.

"It's full of small, icy, dirty and rocky objects that started to build into planets but, for some mysterious reason, stopped in mid-stride," he said.