NASA mulls sending orbiter mission to Pluto; funds feasibility check

Eyeing a mission to explore the farthest 'planet' of our solar system, NASA is reportedly considering to send an orbiter to the dwarf planet Pluto. According to international reports, NASA on Saturday has funded the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to study the feasibility of a possible Pluto orbiter mission. SwRI will reportedly study design and instrument requirements and cost of the potential project.

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NASA mulling Pluto mission?

Previously, in 2015, when NASA's New Horizons mission snapped the first-ever up-close photos of Pluto it was found that Pluto consisted a 2-mile-high (3.2 kilometers) mountains of water ice and vast plains of nitrogen ice. Since then, NASA's New Horizons probe has done another flyby near the Kuiper Belt in January 2019. The probe is also equipped to do another flyby near Kuiper Belt, if the mission is given a green signal.

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What does the mission aim to do?

Explaining the probable orbiter mission to Pluto, SwRI's Alan Stern said, "Our mission concept is to send a single spacecraft to orbit Pluto for two Earth years before breaking away to visit at least one KBO and one other KBO dwarf planet", in a statement. Unfortunately, the new NASA funding does not confirm a Pluto orbiter to be launched. But the SwRI team has been working on an orbiter concept for some time, as per reports.

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Pluto's Earth-like qualities

Meanwhile, in 2018, a new study published in Science revealed that the dwarf planet has dunes. These dunes are not like sand dunes on Earth but are made from solid methane ice grains. Dunes are rare in other planets in our solar system with only Earth, Mars, Venus, Saturn's moon Titan, and Comet 67P containing. With this discovery made on Pluto, scientists had concluded that it still has Earth-like characteristics, despite being 30 times further away from the sun as the Earth. This had added to the pro-Pluto debate, with renewed calls for restoration in its planetary status, which been downgraded in August 2006 as it did not meet the three criteria the International Astronomical Union uses to define a full-sized planet.

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