After traveling for nearly 10 years, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is finally set to fly past Pluto on July 14 in humankind’s first close encounter with the dwarf planet.
But the spacecraft is at least a decade old (arguably more like two decades, as spacecraft need to use tried-and-tested components). If it had been built with today’s technology, New Horizons could have been able to send back a lot more data a lot faster. So how do space scientists cope with using old technology to make new discoveries and how will it affect the science they can do?
The search for Pluto began in 1906 when Percival Lowell started a project to find a ninth planet. Unfortunately, he died just ten years later, but the search was eventually continued by Clyde Tombaugh who found the first indications of the planet on Feb. 18, 1930, when he noticed a tiny speck of light moving between two pictures taken in January that year.
New Horizons is actually carrying Tombaug’s ashes aboard, on his request.
Some 60 years after this discovery, a group of scientists started to work getting a spacecraft to Pluto and its moon Charon. This was being done at a time when we didn’t know about its four additional companions, the moons Nix and Hydra (discovered in 2005), and Kerberos and Styx (discovered in 2011 and 2012 respectively). We also didn’t know that Pluto had an atmosphere.
Various ideas were developed, from Pluto 350, which was a small spacecraft with only four instruments, to a large and highly capable spacecraft similar to Cassini, which is exploring Saturn and its surroundings. Ultimately these ideas didn’t get beyond the design phase.
