Half Way To Pluto

Congratulations to Alan Stern, APL, NASA and the rest of the New Horizons team. This is certainly space exploration at its finest!

So let's see... New Horizons is halfway to Pluto. We have Casinni currently orbiting Saturn, Messenger on the way to Mercury, multiple surface and orbital craft at Mars, one spacecraft orbiting the moon, Dawn, Epoxi (Deep Impact) and a few others scooting around the inner system and two Voyager spacecraft on their way out of the Solar System. Once New Horizons reaches Pluto United States spacecraft will have visited every major planetary body in the solar system with more on the way.

Too bad the Chinese are going to replace us as leaders in space exploration at any moment.

Seesh!

We've been living through a renaissance in robotic planetary exploration. It's still a Golden Age of discovery.

Just remember, this program was also canceled by the Executive branch.

> Just remember, this program was also canceled by the Executive branch.

Did you check the budget for planetary science or heliophysics? Voyager's been moved into heliophysics, which makes sense, but the rest appear to be getting support through planetary science.

"Did you check the budget for planetary science or heliophysics?"

Huh? I suggest you check this Pluto's mission funding during the Clinton and Bush administration.

At that time, the agency was building NH, launching it, & conducting the flyby past Jupiter. Right now, they're in sleeper cruise mode, during which APL turns most of the probe's instruments off to save juice, except for a wake-up once a year to recalibrate, make course corrections, &c.. That phase ends in 2015. The funding may be less because they're not doing all the amazing fun stuff, but they're hardly off the budget.

"At that time, the agency was building NH, launching it, & conducting the flyby past Jupiter. "

Huh?

From an IEEE report:

Under Clinton
"By September 2000, NASA cancelled PKE (Pluto-Kuiper Express), still in Phase A, owing to mission cost increases which pushed the projected mission cost over the $1B mark."

"Following this cancellation, intense scientific and public pressure caused then NASA Associate Administrator for Space Science E. Weiler to solicit mission proposals in 2001 for a Pluto Kuiper belt flyby reconnaissance mission."

Under Bush
"Shortly after the 19 January 2001 AO release, on 6 February 2001, the then-new Bush Administration released its first budget, which cancelled PKB by not funding it in FY02 and future years. Within days, NASA announced the suspension of the PKB AO as well. However, intensive work on Capital Hill within the science community resulted in less than a week in a directive from the U.S. Senate to NASA to proceed with the AO so as not to limit Congressional authority to override the PKB cancellation decision."

This went on each year I think where it wasn't in the budget, but Congress restored it.