Assembly of NASA's New Horizons Pluto-Kuiper Belt (PKB) spacecraft is scheduled for completion this month, while a New Horizons 2 mission to the Kuiper Belt, this time via Uranus, is being discussed.
PKB is scheduled for launch early next year and will reach Pluto in 2015 at the earliest. The window for the Atlas V launch from Cape Canaveral opens on 11 January 2006 and extends to 14 February.
If the launch takes place in the first 23 days of the window, the probe will explore Jupiter in February-March 2007 en route to Pluto. If the first window is missed, PKB will be delayed until a secondary launch window from 2-15 February 2007, which will allow a direct flight to Pluto, but the craft will not arrive at until 2020.
Built by Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, PKB will become the first craft to look for Kuiper Belt Objects (KBO), bodies in the 40- to 90km-diameter range beyond the orbit of Pluto.
Meanwhile, NASA is considering follow-on New Horizon projects, including a $550 million mission to Uranus that would provide a second opportunity to explore the Kuiper Belt. Following launch in 2008-09, and a gravity-assist flyby of Jupiter, the probe would reach Uranus in 2014 then continue on into the Kuiper Belt.
The Kuiper Belt is the prime target of this mission, "but it so happens that Uranus will be in the way and we can revisit the planet with modern instrumentation", says Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons at the Southwest Research Institute.
TIM FURNISS / LONDON
Source: Flight International
