The Black Vault - Pluto Mission Jeopardized by Possible Funding Slash

A NASA mission to Pluto that was set for a 2006 launch is now in jeopardy in the face of a surprising proposal to slash funding.

The House on Friday voted to cut $55 million from NASA's New Frontiers program for 2004 as part of the overall NASA budget of $15.5 billion. Debate now moves to the Senate.

Nearly all of the $130 million New Frontiers budget for 2004 was to be used for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. The mission's 2003 funding is secure, but scientists warn of serious delays and cost increases if the 2004 budget is cut.

The sudden and unexpected change in fortune has scientists baffled. Richard Binzel, chair of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society, sounded the alarm Monday in a letter to DPS members.

"Such a cut will seriously delay the launch and science return" of the Pluto mission, said Binzel, an MIT professor of astronomy.

He added that such a cut would ultimately increase the cost of the mission.

Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons, confirmed that the proposed funding cut would jeopardize the planned 2006 launch, thereby raising the overall cost of the mission. Stern leads a team at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. that is developing the probe and planning the mission.

"When it takes you more years to develop something, it's not as efficient," Stern said in a telephone interview. If the launch were postponed to 2007, mission planners would miss an opportunity to use Jupiter for a gravitational boost and it would also take 3 years longer to get to Pluto, adding to the cost.

Stern said that would add $70 million to $80 million to the overall price tag.

As of 2001, the mission was required by NASA to stay under a $504 million cap. That figure goes up with inflation. Of the total mission expense, about $300 million is needed just to get off the launch pad under the original plan. The rest would go toward mission support while the probe is en route and when it sends data and pictures back to Earth.

New Horizons would be the first mission to Pluto, the last unexplored planet in the solar system and one that holds many secrets. A recently noted warming trend on Pluto has astronomers puzzled, for example. But the planet is too far away to be well studied by even the most powerful telescopes.

Last year, an independent committee of the National Academies recommended the Pluto mission be a top priority for NASA.

If launched in 2006, the New Horizons probe would arrive in 2015 and examine Pluto's surface and atmosphere during a flyby. It would also target one or more Kuiper Belt Objects, frozen Pluto-like objects that populate the outer solar system.

NASA long resisted approving a mission to Pluto, preferring to delay any such project until more advanced propulsion schemes could be worked out. The DPS and the independent Planetary Society lobbied for going soon, before Pluto's atmosphere freezes out as it heads into an extended winter on its elongated orbit around the Sun.

Ironically in the face of the possible new cuts, Congress earlier this year went against NASA's wishes and wrote New Frontiers into the 2003 budget, as first reported by SPACE.com. The 2003 New Frontiers budget of $110 million -- nearly all of it set aside for the New Horizons mission to Pluto -- is secure.

"It makes no sense to have a flight program undergo severe swings from year to year," Binzel said in his letter to the DPS scientists.

The battleground for restoring the proposed 2004 cuts now moves to the Senate, Binzel said, with initial action to take place in the Senate Appropriations Committee. He called on planetary scientists to write to their Senators and to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Friday's House vote came just a day after NASA awarded to Lockheed Martin the launch contract for New Horizons -- a clear indication that the space agency did not see funding trouble might develop 24 hours later.

"I personally did not have any advance knowledge of it," said Roy Maizel, director of the Resource Management Division at NASA's Office of Space Science (OSS).

"This is part of complex negotiations between the House and Senate," Maizel, who is in charge of developing and implementing the OSS portion of NASA's budget, said in a telephone interview. "There is still a long way to go before this becomes law."

http://www.space.com/news/pluto_jeopardy_030729.html