Last week in my lab’s journal club I was presenting on two white papers detailing the reasoning for possible missions to explore the outer solar system. These papers are part of the Astro2020 decadal survey, and I figured I would share some thoughts on them here. As both papers are short (<10 pages each) and interesting, I recommend you read them in their entireties, this will just be a summary of each.

Outer Solar System Exploration: A Compelling and Unified Dual Mission Decadal Strategy for Exploring Uranus, Neptune, Triton, Dwarf Planets, and Small KBOs and Centaurs

The full pre-print can be found here, and details two missions. One cheap flagship mission ($2.6B) to Neptune, and a New Horizons mission ($1B) for a Uranus and Dwarf planet flyby tour.

Why do we want to accomplish this mission?

Ice Giants (Neptune/Uranus) are relatively unexplored but makeup a large fraction of exoplanets found so far.

Neptune’s moon Triton is also a “high propriety ocean world target”

Additionaly, for the fly-by mission, it’s targets, “20-200 Km Kuiper belt objects (KBOs), … [are the] best window into the initial stage of planet formation.”

Why is this mission interesting from an astrodynamics POV?

For the Uranus flyby, they’re looking at continuing onwards to dwarf planets and other KBOS. There are a lot of cool optimization problems to be solved in deciding both what KBOs we can look at, and how to change the flyby to minimize the fuel to get to them!

A White Paper on Pluto Follow On Missions: Background, Rationale, and New Mission Recommendations

The full pre-print can be found here, but it describes sending an orbiter as a followup to the New Horizons mission to further explore the Pluto/Charon system. I wrote up about New Horizons here, but that mission raised a lot of interesting questions about these two bodies.

Why do we want to accomplish this mission?

Pluto/Charon is extremely diverse for its size, and we’ve only imaged about 40% at a high resolution (10 km/pixel or less)

This system will teach us about the evolution of ice-ocean worlds

Pluto/Charon can provide insight into Earth-Moon formation, “an objective that cannot be accomplished with any closer system”

Why is this mission interesting from an astrodynamics POV?

The Pluto and Charon system is one where the two bodies have masses close to each other and this leads to really interesting 3-body dynamics. Additionally, Pluto’s other moons are influenced by “exotic three-body resonances”.

Is Pluto a Planet?

Because these papers were referencing pluto, I figured I should mention the pluto is a planet debate. Is pluto a planet?

“No” – Dr. Michael Brown (Caltech – Planetary Astronomy)

“Yes” – Dr Alan Stern (Former NASA -Planetary Scientist)

“I don’t care, it’s an interesting place, and we should explore it more” – Me

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