A new Persephone mission is still in the planning stages. It should go to the dwarf planet Pluto, located beyond Neptune. The vehicle should explain some of the mysteries left by the New Horizons flyby.
New planned mission to Pluto
Although Pluto has lost its status as a full-fledged planet, that doesn’t mean it has no special place in the hearts of scientists. There are practical and sentimental reasons for this – Pluto has tantalizing secrets that New Horizons, the latest spacecraft that visited the system, has only added to. To explore these mysteries, a multidisciplinary team from dozens of universities and research institutes has proposed the Persephone mission to explore Pluto and last 50 years.
In 2015, New Horizons flew past the Pluto system, which is now technically considered part of the Kuiper belt. The mission collected data on the dwarf planet and its unique moon, Charon. Now scientists have time to analyze the data from that mission, and it leaves much to be desired — particularly data on some of the surface features they observed.
According to an article published back in 2021, Persephone’s new mission is still in the planning stages. It should travel to the dwarf planet Pluto, located beyond Neptune, and has four basic scientific questions it is designed to answer:
- How has the population of the Kuiper Belt evolved
- What are the particle and magnetic field environments of the Kuiper Belt?
- How have the surfaces of both Pluto and Charon changed?
- What are the internal structures of Pluto and Charon?
Stages of Persephone’s future mission
The latter is perhaps the most intriguing, since the answer to Pluto’s internal structure may lie in its possession of an underground ocean despite being so far from the Sun. There is already some evidence for this, as Pluto has an active surface, and the ice sheet called the Sputnik Planitia could potentially be caused by an underground ocean. We don’t have enough data to prove it yet.
This is exactly what Persephone is designed to provide. Unfortunately, according to the inexorable logic of orbital mechanics and the current limitations of propulsion technology, any such mission would take several decades, even with gravitational support from Jupiter.
The Persephone mission was designed for nearly 31 years, including a 28-year mission phase and a three-year period in orbit around Pluto and Charon. Next, the mission could be extended to visit other Kuiper Belt objects to help limit the scattering of different types of objects in this massive region of space.
The development of a more efficient nuclear-electric propulsion system could help shorten the mission by 2 years, even with a heavier payload than planned for Persephone. Such a system has been described, but may not be available for the planned 2031 launch of a vehicle aboard an SLS rocket.
Probe design
A set of sensors will be taken with Persephone, regardless of its propulsion system, and they can be applied to any object encountered during the mission. According to the mission plan, this includes Jupiter and its moons. These sensors include cameras, spectrometers, radars, magnetometers and altimeters to achieve the necessary scientific objectives of the mission.
An important distinction of the mission is that it is designed as an orbiter rather than a flyby. According to the authors, much of the data that needs to be gathered would be impossible to collect in the short period of time that the system would provide while flying past it. The orbiter will be able to stay in orbit and collect data for three years about Pluto and Charon, including the dynamics of their active surfaces.
This proposal is just one of many proposals for missions to outer planets that require further funding, and the preliminary estimate of $3 billion puts it in the higher range of those missions. But if it is funded to a certain extent, it could answer the questions that New Horizons has raised, even if it takes decades to do so.
Provided by phys.org
