"As data return from New Horizons continues, we can hope that an encounter with a Kuiper Belt Object is still in its future. But such an encounter will, like the flyby of Pluto/Charon itself, be a fleeting event past an object at huge distance. Our next chance to study a KBO might take place a bit closer in, and perhaps we'll be able to study it with the same intense focus that Dawn is now giving the dwarf planet Ceres. How about an orbiter around Neptune, whose moon Triton is thought by many to be a KBO captured by the ice giant long ago?
The thought is bubbling around some parts of NASA, and was voiced explicitly by the head of the agency's planetary science division, Jim Green, at this week's meeting of a working group devoted to missions to the outer planets. Stephen Clark tackles the story in Uranus, Neptune in NASA's Sights for a New Robotic Mission, which recounts the basic issues now in play. What comes across more than anything else is the timescale involved in putting together flagship missions, multi-billion dollar efforts on the order of our Cassini Saturn orbiter.
Right now Europa is the more immediate priority when it comes to outer planets work, and for good reason, since NASA has already approved a probe to the Jovian moon. Here we're talking about 2022 as the earliest possible launch date for a spacecraft that would orbit Jupiter and perform repeated close flybys of Europa, a world we need to study close-up because of the evidence for a liquid water ocean beneath its crust and the possibility of life there. Whether such a probe actually flies as early as 2022 is problematic, and so is the launch vehicle, which in a perfect confluence of events could conceivably be NASA's powerful Space Launch System…"
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