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Space & Planetary Science

New Horizons May Only Complete Half Its Mission

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
May 20, 2014
Filed under

Pluto-bound probe faces crisis, Nature
“Nearly 4.3 billion kilometres from Earth, and most of the way to Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is in danger of missing out on half of its mission. Project managers face a looming deadline to identify an icy object in the outer Solar System for the probe to fly by after it passes Pluto. A visit to a Kuiper belt object, or KBO, was always meant to be a key part of New Horizons’ US$700-million journey, which began in 2006. But there is only a slim chance that astronomers will find a suitable KBO with their current strategy of using ground-based telescopes – and securing time on the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope is far from guaranteed.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

6 responses to “New Horizons May Only Complete Half Its Mission”

  1. Odyssey2020 says:
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    I”m sure the Hubble committee will approve the requested time. Regardless, we’ll know for sure by the middle of June.

  2. Enceladus says:
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    The New Horizon mission planners stated from the beginning that they would try to find an object beyond Pluto to observe. They never promised they would find anything past Pluto. This mission is to fly past Pluto, anything beyond that is a bonus. To state that “half the mission” is going to missed is ridiculous. Of course, this is not the only negative piece about this mission posted in here. There have been others in the past attempting to discredit this mission and those who work on it.

    • objose says:
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      excuse my ignorance, but now that it is not a planet, isn’t essentially PLUTO a KBO? Given the history of failed attempts to get to Mars by multiple countries, I think getting a probe by Pluto is 100% success of the mission. Agree with you Enceladus. Too much negative press on this.

    • guest44 says:
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      Not True. At the non-advocate review the NH mission promised that it would find a KBO and considered the KBO visit equally, if not more compelling, scientifically than the Pluto visit. The NAR identified the lack of known KBO as a mission risk, and the NH project promised to identify one within one year of the NAR (i.e. before launch). The process was considered trivial by the NH project.

  3. Ben Russell-Gough says:
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    It was always going to be ‘iffy’ that they would miraculously find a more distant KBO conveniently placed for New Horizons to visit after Pluto. I think that defining the mission on the assumption that they would find one would be ignoring all the lessons of nearly five centuries of scientific below-visual-magnitude planetary astronomy.

    There was always going to be a significant probability that it wouldn’t happen; if the mission was sold on the assurance that it would happen, then that assurance was a bottle of patent snake oil. In some ways, it reminds me of NASA’s current travails about finding a NEA to visit or bring back to EML-2.

  4. VLaszlo says:
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    I’m just excited that we have an exploration mission en route to a first look at an unvisited celestial body. A second one would be nice, but Pluto is plenty.