Donald Savage
Headquarters, Washington, DC                           June 6, 2001
(Phone: 202/358-1547)

RELEASE:  01-114

NASA SELECTS TWO INVESTIGATIONS FOR 
PLUTO-KUIPER BELT MISSION FEASIBILITY STUDIES 

     In the first step of a potential two-step process, NASA has 
selected two proposals for detailed mission feasibility studies as 
candidates for a Pluto-Kuiper Belt (PKB) mission to explore the 
only planet in our Solar System yet to be visited by a spacecraft 
from Earth.

The President's FY 2002 budget request does not contain development 
funding for a Pluto mission.  The Congress requested that NASA not 
do anything precipitous which would preclude the ability to develop 
a Pluto-Kuiper mission until the Congress could consider it in the 
context of the FY 2002 budget.  If funding is provided in the FY 
2002 budget and either proposal is ultimately selected, the Agency 
could down-select a proposal for development to ultimately fly a 
spacecraft to Pluto and beyond. If a PKB mission is developed, 
launch would be in the 2004-2006 time frame and the spacecraft 
would arrive at Pluto before 2020.  

"The PKB mission represents a possible opportunity to visit the 
only planet not yet explored by spacecraft," said Dr. Colleen 
Hartman, Pluto Program Director in NASA's Office of Space Science, 
Washington, DC. "It's really an opportunity to, in a sense, look 
into a deep-freeze of history which could tell us how our Solar 
System evolved to what it is today, including the precursor 
ingredients of life."
 
Each team will receive $450,000 to conduct a three-month concept 
study. At the end of the three months, NASA will thoroughly 
evaluate program content and technical, schedule and cost 
feasibilities of both proposals to determine if either is 
selectable. 

The two selected proposals were judged to have the best science 
value among the five proposals submitted to NASA in April 2001 in 
response to the Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission Announcement of 
Opportunity. Each selected investigation will work with the Office 
of Space Science at NASA Headquarters to finalize the design of the 
spacecraft and its accommodation of the instrument sets. 

The selected investigations are:

Pluto and Outer Solar System Explorer (POSSE). Dr. Larry Esposito, 
Principal Investigator, University of Colorado, Boulder, will lead 
a team including the following major participants: NASA's Jet 
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, CA; Lockheed Martin 
Astronautics, Denver; Malin Space Science Systems, Inc., San Diego; 
Ball Aerospace Corp., Boulder, CO; and University of California, 
Berkeley.

New Horizons: Shedding Light on Frontier Worlds. Dr. S. Alan Stern, 
Principal Investigator, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, CO, 
will lead a team including the following major participants: Johns 
Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD; Ball 
Aerospace Corp.; Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA; NASA's Goddard 
Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD; and JPL.

Both proposals are for complete missions, including launch vehicle, 
spacecraft and science instrument payload. Both address the major 
science objectives defined in the original announcement. Each 
proposal includes a remote sensing package that includes imaging 
instruments, a radio science investigation, and other experiments 
to characterize the global geology and morphology of Pluto and 
Charon, map their surface composition, and characterize Pluto's 
neutral atmosphere and its escape rate.

Pluto is a different kind of planet. It is not a rocky planet like 
Earth, Mars, Mercury or Venus, or a gas giant like Jupiter, Saturn, 
Uranus or Neptune. It is a Kuiper Belt Object, a class of objects 
composed of material left over after the formation of the other 
planets, which has never been exposed to the higher temperatures 
and solar radiation levels of the inner solar system.

It is known that Pluto has large quantities of ices of nitrogen, 
and simple molecules containing combinations of carbon, hydrogen 
and oxygen that are the necessary precursors of life. These ices 
would be largely lost to space if Pluto had come close to the Sun. 
Instead they remain on Pluto as a representative sample of the 
primordial material that set the stage for the evolution of the 
Solar System as it exists today, including life.

If a PKB mission is developed, it will be a Principal Investigator-
led investigation, bringing together teams from academia, industry, 
NASA Centers and other communities, and will be developed following 
the highly successful management philosophy of the Discovery 
Program.