The mission plan named “Persephone” is estimated to be able to explore Pluto and her months for 50 years. However, this can only be realized if you receive funding and approval.
In 2015, NASA’s New Horizons’ New Horizons space was successfully flying through Pluto and found that the planet was dwarfed, it turned out to have an ice surface, fog layer, and a sign of complex geological activity.
This discovery indicates the possibility of an ocean under the surface of Pluto. This fact encourages scientists to continue to examine Pluto’s mystery, even 10 years after the cross -flying mission.
“There are still many questions that have not been answered,” said Carly Howett, Planet Oxford University scientist and a member of the New Horizons team, at the Progress in Understanding the Pluto Mission: 10 Years After Flyby in Laurel, Maryland. With these questions, Howett and his colleagues designed further mission in the hope that he could finally solve some of Pluto’s mysteries.
This kind of mission is designed to explore the outer area of the solar system and takes decades to be implemented. Even so, the plan has not yet received official approval.
According to Howett in a 2021 study at the Planetary Science Journal that discussed this concept, “This mission can operate for more than 50 years, challenging engineering, mission operations, and data analysis in a way that has never been done before.”
In Roman mythology, Pluto is known as a god and ruler of the dead.
For the mission that was designed back to the planetary planet, Howett and his team chose the name of Persephone, inspired by the figure of Pluto’s wife as well as the “Queen of the Lower World” in Greek mythology.
The selection of this name is considered appropriate because Pluto itself is named based on the gods of the Roman underground world, and besides that it also reflects the diversity in their team, where many women occupy leadership positions.
The mission of the Persephone is designed to examine the shape of Pluto to look for signs of fossil protrusions, a kind of “lump” that forms when gravity draws the mass of the planet and can freeze if the inner layer is liquid.
This kind of protrusion is not found by the New Horizons vehicle, but the Persephone will carry a more sophisticated instrument to conduct detailed examinations.
In addition, this mission will also study the composition of Pluto and Charon by measuring gravity and topography, similar to the way researchers study the monthly, enceladus. From that data, scientists can even estimate the thickness of the ice layer that is below the surface.
Even so, do not expect Persephone’s mission to be launched soon, because its large power needs can make it difficult to enter the official plan.
The proposal from Howett is only one of the several proposals submitted to provide input on the NASA decade survey, which determines the priorities and feasibility of space mission in the future. (Live Science/Z-2)
