RETURN TO PLUTO
If you had dedicated 26 years of your life to sending the first-ever spacecraft to Pluto, and if you had seen that mission succeed in shedding new scientific light on this far-flung planetary system, what would you do next?
Bask in the glory or make plans to go back? For Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, it was a no-brainer. “We rewrote the textbooks in the case of Pluto. In fact, I think we wrote the textbooks from scratch,” he tells All About Space. And there is no doubt in his mind that planetary science needs to return.
At the end of October 2019, it was revealed that such a plan is being formulated. NASA is funding a study by the Southwest Research Institute into the feasibility, attributes and cost of sending an orbiter to Pluto and its system of moons, with Dr Carly Howett, assistant director in the department of space studies at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, heading a team that is looking into the development and design of the spacecraft and its payload.
The idea is that the orbiter will analyse Pluto’s system in far greater depth. “We’re looking to bring back the same type of instrumentation that New Horizons had, but to do a more thorough job,” Stern explains. “A first flyby was the appropriate thing to do with Pluto, but we have
