The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Dark, distant, named for the jealous Roman god of the dead and often sheathed in frozen gases, Pluto has stalked the edge of the solar system for eons, the only planet never visited by a spacecraft, in an orbit around the sun that takes centuries to complete.
So tiny and strange is Pluto, smaller than Earth’s moon and rotating at a weird angle, some scientists have questioned its long-held status as the ninth planet.
Now, after years of on-and-off effort, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has received preliminary funding from Congress for a mission to fling a spacecraft 3 billion miles or so to go take a look.
The pioneering voyage is to take about 10 years.
"It’s marvelous," said Andrew Cheng, 50, the mission’s project scientist, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. "It’s about the most exciting thing that we’ve done in a long, long time."
The "New Horizons" mission, which would be managed by the Applied Physics Lab, also calls for the spacecraft to plunge beyond Pluto, into the recently discovered and even more remote Kuiper Belt.
There, some scientists believe, resides the frozen refuse of the solar system’s creation, which may include fledgling comets and weird "planetoids" as big as, or perhaps bigger than, Pluto.
NASA said Congress provided
$30 million for the next phase of study and development by the Applied Physics Lab — where the spacecraft is to be built — the Boulder institute and other agencies working on the project. NASA said further work on the
$488 million enterprise is contingent on, among other things, continued funding from Congress.
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