Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
This summer, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will complete a flyby of Pluto, studying among other things the surface composition, geology, morphology, atmosphere and surface temperature of the dwarf planet and its moons. The goal is to understand how the system formed.
What happens if it finds something unexpected – something that warrants a closer look? Do we have the capabilities to someday send a manned mission to explore what had previously been the ninth planet in the solar system? Tim DeBenedictis, lead developer of the SkySafari line of apps at Simulation Curriculum, tackled that issue in a recent op-ed for Space.com.
“Suppose, this coming July, that New Horizons were to discover something truly wild as it flashed past Pluto,” he pondered in the article. “What if it revealed a bizarre surface chemistry that, like the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere, could only be the result of some biological process? What if its imager were to record a clearly artificial set of markings on its surface?”
Were that to happen, could NASA forgo plans to develop a rover or lander to send to Pluto and decide to try and tackle a daunting manned mission to the distant dwarf planet? And even if they wanted to travel there, could they? Could such a trip be feasible in the near future?
Sending humans to Pluto? Never say never.
According to DeBenedictis, using the most advanced propulsion systems currently available, it would take at least 10 years to send a 3.5-pound spacecraft into orbit around Pluto, and unlike on the International Space Station, astronauts heading the dwarf planet would be unable to receive supplies and would require fully self-contained life-support systems.
In addition, there would be no swapping crew members in and out – Pluto astronauts would have to be in it for the long haul, forced to spend a minimum of 10-times longer in space than NASA’s Mark Kelly and Russian Cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are currently attempting as part of the ongoing Year In Space experiment to test the impact of prolonged exposure to microgravity on a human body. To date, nobody has spent more than 437 days in space, he noted.
Furthermore, DeBenedictis said that “no small, closed, self-contained biosphere capable of supporting human life has survived more than two years in space.” Another possibility would be to place astronauts into hibernation, but as DeBenedictis pointed out, scientists currently do not know how to place humans into hibernation and have them wake up alive and unharmed, putting such a possibility fully in the realm of science fiction at this point.
While he also points out that there are many other obstacles to overcome, DeBenedictis does not fully write off the possibility that mankind will eventually step foot on Pluto. As he points out, the dwarf planet was only discovered 85 years ago, and today “a spacecraft carrying the ashes of its discoverer is speeding toward that planet – a feat unimaginable in 1930. What will the next 85 years bring? If there’s anything you should count on, it’s not to count anything out.”
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