Hijacking New Horizons

Keith’s note: Last week I posted some fascinating news – our solar system may actually have a second Kuiper Belt. The news originated from a New Horizons Science Team meeting. While that finding is rather tentative and is based on ground-based observations, the person making the presentation was a mission co-investigator. Now, instead of simply heading out into interstellar space, New Horizons is going to be heading toward a possible second Kuiper Belt in the late 2020s/early 2030’s time frame. Who knows – perhaps there will be a possible flyby target. But wait: just as this big planetary science news is emerging the NASA Science Mission Directorate wants to turn this planetary science mission – the only one that can visit this region of space in the coming decades – into a heliophysics mission instead. Go figure. So how did we get here? (More below)

NASA spent approximately $900 million to design, build, and fly the New Horizons spacecraft to explore the planet Pluto and our Sun’s distant Kuiper Belt. It has done so spectacularly. Yet NASA Headquarters managers are now planning to terminate the mission’s exploration of the Kuiper Belt years before the spacecraft exits the very zone it was sent to explore!  



This is a perfectly good spacecraft that is fully operational with a team on Earth that is fully experienced, dedicated, and by NASA’s own measures performing well”. Together the spacecraft and the team are doing exactly what the mission was designed to do. – planetary and Heliophysics. Now, for want of a few years and a small amount of money NASA managers want to play managerial musical chairs and have the mission do something that they are already doing 24/7/365 i.e. Heliophysics, thus abandoning the very task that taxpayers sent New Horizons out to do i.e. explore The Kuiper belt. Talk about bad optics, NASA. 



Yes, NASA does things like this. A lot. Hard decisions with limited funds have to be made every year – but other times the decisions have little to do with saving money and more to do with whose sandbox things are placed into. That is what is happening here. No one is saving money. Rather, they are wasting it.



(Again) So how did we get here?



Once a year NASA has to make decisions about what it can afford to fund. NASA is pretty good about keeping missions going so as to squeeze the most out of a spacecraft and its human support team. Indeed, sometimes the spacecraft just won’t quit. I can recall back in the mid 1980s shortly after I started working in and around NASA HQ seeing a routine status report for the Voyager spacecraft that had recently be re-christened as an “Interstellar Mission” which was plain to see on its cover. Wow, I thought to myself. “Interstellar”.



Since then I have watched innumerable missions do their thing, get extensions, and then extensions to the extensions, re-namings etc. I even co-lead a team that brought the ISEE-3 aka ICE back to the life albeit for a short period in 2014 in a space-pirate installed crowd sourcing effort. Old space droids can do new tricks. It’s the humans that need closer monitoring.



New Horizons – that spacecraft that dazzled the world by flying past the planet Pluto and its retinue of odd moons in 2015 – went through a rather prolonged birth process.  But a dozen years years later, in mere days the entire Plutonian system went from being blurry circular images of a few pixels to full, geologically varied worlds in their own right. The “big reveal” was reminiscent of when the twin Voyagers swept past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune ie. new worlds revealed – every day.



New Horizons had different names and configurations before it became “New Horizons”. The arguments in the late 1990s and early 2000s about whether to explore Pluto got to the point that the National Academy of Science was called in to assess the viability and importance of a mission to explore Pluto and its environs plus the Kuiper Belt as well. The Academy has adopted a process blessed by NASA, NSF, and Congress wherein surveys of what we know and what we need to know in space are out together, They’re called “Decadal Surveys”. The National Academy’s Decadal surveys have now assumed a rather lofty and authoritative role and are routinely cited as the deciding factor and validation of  a wide range of things. If a mission has this stamp of Decadal approval then you know you have the wind in your sails.



Armed with that approval and some Congressional efforts, the agency moved ahead with the mission. The team who won the mission competition, New Horizons translated its plans into the form of a machine, implemented a mission plan, and then launched. Part of the mission involved a Jupiter flyby to adjust its trajectory and gain some speed. In so doing New Horizons also conducted a Voyager redux was possible wherein everything in the jovian system had a chance to be noticed. Citizen science entered into this as well with non-professionals helping to plan imaging and other aspects of the brief trip through Jupiter space.

After that New Horizons went into hibernation and sped towards Pluto. All the while the mission team practiced and practiced using every target of opportunity to exercise the spacecraft and their own skills. As such the Pluto flyby itself was utterly flawless. Data from that mission is still yielding surprises nearly a decade after the encounter, and the team has been given multiple prestigious awards for their work.


But New Horizons had another goal other than Pluto as set by the National Academy’s Decadal Survey – one of equal importance: to encounter at least as many Kuiper Belt Objects the mission team can conduct. An army of telescopes on Earth and in space scoured the Kuiper Belt for targets. One prime choice was selected, 2014 MU69 later renamed 486958 Arrokoth, or simply “Arrokoth”. That flyby occurred – again with flawless precision – on 1 January 2019. As was the case with Pluto, the encounter with Arrokoth settled some ongoing questions and then presented a whole set of new questions – which every good space science mission should do. We build our understanding of the universe while standing on the shoulders of the humans – and robots – who came before us.



Now New Horizons is looking for a final flyby target while still on a path out of our solar system toward interstellar space. And it is not done doing science on other Kuiper Belt objects (besides the hoped for flyby target) by any means. With a seasoned team in place New Horizons has much more to offer. And the cost of keeping this team together is just under $10 million per year. The cost of most science missions at NASA is much, much larger than this. Many extended mission cost two to almost ten times that just to start the discussion. For example Cassini (albeit an orbiter) cost $80 million a year to operate and NASA extended it multiple times.



New Horizons represents a $900 million investment by taxpayers on a spacecraft designed to explore the Kuiper Belt. As is the case with many other missions still in operation, New Horizons is a bargain – and given that it cost nearly a billion dollars to conduct, anything you can do to keep that team and the mission going is simply maximizing that investment. $10 million a year for a $900+ million investment/ Hmmm. If there is a bargain in space science this is a perfect example.


Alas, NASA has other ideas. It is perfectly understandable to delay missions or cancel them when huge budget cuts across the agency are needed. But NASA wants to eviscerate the remaining New Horizons exploration of the Kuiper Belt and also give the mission to a whole new team. Saving money is not the reason. Indeed it may save only a couple of million or possibly cost a couple of million more (in another budget) – depending on which managerial trick they pursue. This is not a cost saving measure. It is a hijacking of the exploration of the Kuiper Belt.



As an example of the Academy’s thinking in endorsing New Horizons (then called the “Kuiper Belt-Pluto Explorer”) it clearly got a gold star for approval in New Frontiers in the Solar System: An Integrated Exploration Strategy (2003) which stated “A reconnaissance mission to two or more Kuiper Belt objects and Pluto-Charon is at the top of the Primitive Bodies Panel rankings because of its compelling importance to the scientific objectives identified by the panel.” 

The report goes on to say “The Kuiper Belt-Pluto Explorer is the first priority in the medium-cost class … with its potential for creating a new paradigm regarding primitive processes in the outer solar system and their effect on the evolution of bodies in other parts of the solar system.” and also that “The Kuiper Belt-Pluto Explorer mission is ready now, has no requirements for new technology, and can use one of the few remaining first-generation RPSs This is a multiple-object flyby mission designed as the first reconnaissance of a number of Kuiper Belt objects, including the largest and best studied example, Pluto-Charon.”

If you read those words the National Academy used to prioritize New Horizons it is pretty clear how important they assembled experts saw this mission as being. Flash forward to today. Efforts to deal with the NASA FY 2025 budget are gearing up. And NASA’s Science Mission Directorate has decided to try and move the New Horizons mission from the Planetary Science Division to the Heliophysics Division. The plan is to totally remove the entire planetary science team that has carried New Horizons thus far.  An RFP (Request for Proposals) is expected to reach the streets very soon wherein new teams will be sought by NASA to gain control of this planetary science spacecraft – to do heliophysics, which, ironically it already does around the clock. Once that RFP goes out it will become hard to stop the process.


Meanwhile, the New Horizons team is still actively engaged in the search for new potential targets for a last flyby as the spacecraft soars through the Kuiper Belt. Alas, access to time on JWST and Hubble is limited and the New Horizons team has to rely instead only on ground-based telescopes to conduct the search.  Contrary to some interpretations, the key to the Decadal Survey’s approval of what became New Horizons was not visiting Pluto as much as it was to transit the Kuiper Belt visiting and observing many objects. That is what the team is doing – unless NASA shuts them down that is. New Horizons will still be in the Kuiper belt until the 2027-2028 time frame.

The Decadal Support not withstanding, a recent 2022 Planetary Mission Senior Review (PMSR22), section 3.7 said this about New Horizons: “The proposed Kuiper belt object (KBO) studies are unlikely to dramatically improve the state of knowledge.” It is on this singular statement alone that the Planetary Science Division repeatedly seeks to throw the New Horizons mission over the fence to the Heliophysics team. When the members of the Planetary Mission Senior Review found out that this sentence was being interpreted as a call for – or justification of – cancelling the currently planetary science mission of New Horizons, several panel members made their opinions known to NASA and others that this cancellation action was not their intent. That said, NASA seems to be still operating under the misinterpretation that this is indeed what was recommended by the Senior Review.

The Senior Review goes on to list multiple strengths of the current New Horizons spacecraft’s health and team operations – including existing capabilities that they are already being used to provide heliophysics studies. Indeed, in response to the proposed New Horizons Kuiper Belt Extended Mission 2 (K2) mission proposed by the New Horizons team, the Planetary Mission Senior Review Heliophysics panel’s evaluation said “The panel expects the heliophysics science objectives to be met during the proposed K2 mission. Therefore, the Heliophysics New Horizons K2 mission extension proposal is rated Excellent.“ 



Read the report for yourself. The panel seemed to be happy with what the current New Horizons Team is doing and will be doing. So where do we stand? The National Academy of Sciences highly rated the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt; the spacecraft out-performed all expectations and is healthy and still in the Kuiper belt, studying several new Kuiper Belt objects every year. The team is searching for additional flyby targets. It is also making serious contributions to Heliophysics – with the current team. And (again) the most recent Planetary Mission Senior Review rates the ongoing mission performance as being “Excellent”.



So, NASA is saying let’s get rid of the team that earned the “excellent rating”. That is, in essence, what NASA wants to do – and they hang the rationale on a misrepresented sentence in a single report – one that has been repudiated by members of the committee itself. Oh and by the way – now there’s that whole possible second Kuiper Belt thing.

The RFP calling for a totally new focus for the New Horizons mission, the selection of a new team, and the cessation of its planetary science activities is in the final drafting process and is expected to be released soon.  FY 2025 budget preparations are due to start up soon and decisions need to be made – and once made are hard to reverse. 

The notion of turning off a functional spacecraft is a hard one for any NASA manager to make. No one has infinite resources after all. But to turn off the exploration of the Kuiper Belt by New Horizons and, more importantly, to totally disband the team that nurtured the mission from its onset so that a few a trivial amount of money makes no sense and has detrimental optics written all over it for NASA.

The planetary and space science community at large – past and present – has taken note of this unfortunate situation with New Horizons and you can expect to be hearing more about this issue from them in the very near future. Stay tuned.