Pluto Fast Flyby

The Pluto Fast Flyby was a space mission meant to perform a flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto. This spacecraft was meant to be launched by 2000 and reach Pluto by 2010, so it could examine Pluto's atmosphere before it froze to the ground as 'snow' as Pluto moves away from the sun. It was proposed the instruments would be a visible camera, an infared spectrometer, an ultraviolet spectrometer, and a radio transmitter to send its findings back to Earth. As Pluto takes several Earth days to rotate once, and any flyby of Pluto going at the speed it needed to reach Pluto quickly, two spacecraft would have been made to photograph both sides of Pluto and its moon Charon.

The Pluto Fast Flyby was later cancelled due to a lack of funding , but it was replaced by the Pluto Kuiper Express. The Pluto Kuiper Express was cancelled for the same reasons, but the third Pluto flyby mission is currently on its way to Pluto: New Horizons.

ee also

*Pluto
*Pluto Kuiper Express
*New Horizons

Further reading

* [http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-141932_ITM The last world. (Cover Story)] by Dava Sobel