NASA has chosen a New Horizons team led by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) to proceed with Phase B preliminary design studies for the Pluto-Kuiper Belt (PKB) mission.
The APL-led team includes Ball Aerospace, Stanford University and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The PKB needs to be launched in 2006 in order to gain maximum scientific value from the mission, which is to feature a fly-by of the solar system's remotest planet some time before 2020.
Source: Flight International