Pluto for the day

Kenneth Chang has an article in The New York Times about the trip to Pluto:

Planetary scientists are coloring in the family portrait of our solar system as close-up photographs and observations stream back from Pluto, a world three billion miles away with towering mountains of ice, vast smooth plains, and many mysteries yet to be revealed.
The flyby of Pluto last week by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft (photo, undergoing a spin test) is rightly celebrated as a triumph of human ingenuity, the capstone of a mission that unfolded nearly flawlessly.
Yet it almost did not happen, which would have left Pluto as just a hazy dot of light.
New Horizons overcame skeptical NASA officials, repeated threats to its funding, laboratory troubles that constricted the amount of plutonium available to power the spacecraft, and an unforgiving deadline set by the clockwork of the planets. Though none of the obstacles packed the drama of space-exploration crises like the Apollo 13 mission, their number and magnitude seemed unbelievable.
“If you wrote a novel about it, I don’t think people would buy it,” said S. Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator.
The story of New Horizons, the little spacecraft that could (and did) visit a small planet that is now considered too small to be a planet, started fifteen years ago when NASA called it quits on Pluto. For a decade, concepts for sending a mission there had been studied but never done. In 2000, the price tag for the latest incarnation, called Pluto-Kuiper Express, appeared to be getting out of control. “When it was canceled,” Dr. Stern said, “the associate administrator at the time, Ed Weiler, held a press conference and said: ‘We’re out of the Pluto business. It’s over. It’s dead. It’s dead. It’s dead.’ He repeated himself three times.”
Many planetary scientists and Pluto fans reacted in dismay, especially as it seemed to be a case of then or never. Pluto had reached the closest point of its orbit to the Sun in 1989 and was on the outbound trek, turning colder. Scientists worried that Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere would turn to ice and fall to the ground, making Pluto a much less interesting place to study until it neared the sun again two centuries later, when they would be long gone.
There was a second orbital consideration. The quickest way to Pluto is to take a left turn at Jupiter, using the giant planet’s gravity for acceleration, which cuts the travel time by four years. But a launch after January of 2006 would mean Jupiter would be too far out of alignment to provide a boost.
Stamatios Krimigis, then the head of the space department at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore, Maryland and a member of a committee that advised NASA on missions to the outer planets, recalled Dr. Weiler’s asking him in the fall of 2000 whether it would be possible to do a low-cost Pluto mission similar to the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft that the laboratory had built and operated for NASA a few years earlier. “I said, ‘Well, we can look at that,’ ” Dr. Krimigis said in an interview. He was intrigued, but uncertain. Dr. Krimigis pulled together a small group who worked over the Thanksgiving holiday to come up with a cost estimate: a half billion dollars, including the rocket. That quick study sketched out a basic design that would turn into New Horizons.
A few months later, NASA put out a call for proposals, a competition to design a new Pluto mission that would arrive by 2015 and cost less than a half billion.
The Johns Hopkins team knew how to build spacecraft, but the science of Pluto was not its expertise. For that, Dr. Krimigis reached out to Dr. Stern, the head of the Southwest Research Institute’s space studies department in Boulder, Colorado. Dr. Stern was a member of the Pluto Underground, a dozen planetary scientists who in 1989 met in a Baltimore restaurant and discussed how to push NASA toward a Pluto mission. Over the years, he had worked on various studies for Pluto missions, none of which had paid off.
But Dr. Stern, who rallied efforts to persuade NASA to again consider a Pluto mission, liked what he heard from Dr. Krimigis. They discussed, compromised, and then agreed.
In November of 2001, NASA chose New Horizons. “We busted our butts, and we won it,” Dr. Stern said.
That started a four-year, two-month sprint to design, build and test the spacecraft and get it to the launching pad but, almost immediately, there was an obstacle. “Two months later, the Bush administration canceled it,” Dr. Stern said, laughing.
The President’s budget proposal for 2003 included no money for Pluto, the second year in a row that the administration had tried to kill such a mission. But Congress, persuaded by Senator Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland, inserted earmarks in the spending bills to keep the Pluto mission on track.
“Every year Congress had to keep us on life support,” said Glen Fountain, the New Horizons’ project manager.
In 2002, the National Academy of Sciences named Pluto a top priority for NASA’s planetary science missions. “At that point, you could feel things change,” Fountain said.
Managers of spacecraft missions often talk about the trade-offs between cost, schedule and risk. Too quick and too cheap greatly raise the chance of failure. “We don’t believe in that,” Dr. Krimigis said.

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