Should NASA Go Back to Pluto? Here’s What We Need To Know About the Persephone Mission Concept

A question is now being asked in the space industry: if there's a need for NASA to return to Pluto, also known as the dwarf planet.

As indicated in a Forbes report, for the first time, photographed from 7,800 miles away in July 2015, by the nuclear New Frontiers spacecraft, some think Pluto "now needs a dedicated orbiting spacecraft" to unlock its "icy mysteries."

The mission is called Persephone, is a concept developed to study Pluto and two distant KBOs or Kuiper Belt Objects in the outer Solar System's beyond-Neptune, involving a journey to the dwarf planet that could take over 27 years.

Nonetheless, according to the scientists behind the proposed mission, which would launch on the SLS rocket of NASA, and cost approximately $3 billion, could blow wide open the probabilities for discovering life elsewhere in the universe.

ALSO READ: Kepler Space Telescope Reveals About 300 Million Habitable Planets Possibly Exist in the Milky Way

(Photo: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI via Getty Images)
In this handout provided by NASA, the dwarf planet Pluto and Charon were shown on July 11, 2015. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft was nearing its July 14 flyby when it would close to a distance of about 7,800 miles.

The Persephone Mission

Persephone is a notion for a total 30.7-year mission survey to orbit within the Pluto system and comes across a couple of KBOs. The latter mentioned is something achieved only once when in 2019, New Horizons visited Arrokoth.

The NASA paper is currently being considered by the National Academies, which will soon publish the once-per-decade Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey, which covers the years 2020 until 2032. It will determine which space missions NASA needs to begin planning for.

It took 9.5 years for New Horizons to reach Pluto from 2006 until 2015, although the Persephone mission could take over 27 years.

According to Dr. Carly Howett, the mission concept's principal investigator, getting a mission into the Pluto system to circle it and its moon "is a very difficult thing to do" as the dwarf planet is a "long way away."

Howett, a planetary physicist and Space Instrumentation associate professor in the University of Oxford's Department of Physics, added that to get to the planet slow enough to orbit means a very long journey time, although the faster it goes, the more there is a need to break.

In the latter scenario, both hastening and breaking require more fuel which means a bigger, costlier mission. It is a subtle balance complexed by a more advanced power source needs since current radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs, will not last for more than 30 years.

The Need to Go Back to Pluto

Either way, it is somewhere from 18 to 27 years to reach Pluto to go into orbit. Therefore, explained Howett, "we're talking a full childhood" of cruise time, excluding any time of development and operations.

If the suspicion of astronomers about Pluto is true, that it has a subsurface ocean, then, not only does it mean that probably there is another place for life exists in the Earth's own Solar System, although it could also mean that probably, there is another class or planet where the place that there is a possibility of the existence of life in the Universe.

According to Howett, the reason Pluto is active even though it's far from the Sun, and the reason it has liquid water, are the primary questions the Persephone mission concept could answer.

And for that to be answered, he explained, there is a need to go into orbit since "you cannot get adequate information on one flyby."

A similar TechCodex report specified that there is a need to understand the gravity signature, and the only way for it to happen is to orbit it and then find out how it's pulling on the spacecraft time "and time and time again."

Report about the July 14 flyby is shown on CleanTVcom's YouTube video below: