Missions to Neptune visualized.

[NNadir]

It is unlikely that the United States will be in any position, after Bush is done with it, to do any real planetary space science with robot craft. We are doomed.

Still these folks under thinking about what a mission would have looked like, had the citizens of the United States retained some of their collective sanity:

""It's all part of the history of our solar system," said Andrew Ingersoll, a study leader and planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), in a telephone interview. "Neptune and Uranus are ice giants, and made mostly of heavier stuff than Jupiter or Saturn."

Ingersoll and his colleagues envision a Cassini-like mission that could use conventional rocket propulsion and gravity assists to reach Neptune.

Meanwhile, another version of the Neptune mission, which features the use of a nuclear fission reactor and ion propulsion to reach the ice giant and a timescale that spans two decades, is also under scrutiny.

"What makes Neptune unique is Triton," explained David Atkinson, a University of Idaho professor and the science principal investigator for the second study, in an e-mail interview. "It is speculated that Triton is actually a Kuiper Belt Object that was captured by Neptune."

Boeing Satellite Systems' Bernie Bienstock leads the second study with Atkinson...

...Ingersoll's Neptune-bound craft would take a page from many of NASA's far-flung planetary exploration missions and rely on radioisotope thermal generators (RTGs), a long-lasting battery fueled by plutonium, for electric power. The Cassini orbiter currently at Saturn, for example, uses RTGs for power since the vast distance makes solar panels unpractical.

"Yes, we'd need RTGs and yes RTGs carry plutonium," Ingersoll said, adding that the power source can only a danger if it is vaporized over a city, a very unlikely case since most launch scenarios would have them dropping into the ocean in an emergency. "There's been a lot if irrationality about nuclear power and fuels."

Ingersoll's team estimates their spacecraft would take about 12 years to reach Neptune, but stopping once it arrives may be a challenge. His team is studying how to use aerocapture, a maneuver that allows a spacecraft to enter orbit around a planet using the atmosphere and no fuel..."

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/neptune_orbiter_techwed_041215.html

[Yuugal]

1. plutonium?

======="Yes, we'd need RTGs and yes RTGs carry plutonium," Ingersoll said, adding that the power source can only a danger if it is vaporized over a city, a very unlikely case since most launch scenarios would have them dropping into the ocean in an emergency. "There's been a lot if irrationality about nuclear power and fuels."========

There sure has been "a lot of irrationality about nuclear power and fuels." Usually from the kind of crazy people who don't want to screw around with explosion-prone rockets and the most lethal substance we know of.

[NNadir]

3. Maybe you can name someone who has been killed by rockets

containing plutonium? You can't? I didn't think so.

Yes it is irrational fear. For the record, the Apollo 13 spacecraft carrying an RTG crashed into the Pacific ocean has never even been detected, much less caused harm to anyone on the planet.

One can find millions of scientifically illiterate postings on the internet about the "deaths of millions" that were likely to occur from Cassini, but it was all nonsense. In fact, Cassini is orbiting Saturn right now doing one of the most beautiful things that humans can do, extending human vision.

BTW, this irrational claim that Plutonium is the "most lethal substance we know of" comes not from anyone who actually knows anything about Plutonium, but from one internationally known liar, Ralph Nader. He made it up without any data whatsoever, just like he made up, with no data whatsoever, the lie that "Bush is the same as Gore." The Nader lie about Plutonium was picked up the New York Times and repeated as fact, gaining the status of an urban myth. The health physicist Bernard L. Cohen, Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburg, who pioneered the science of risk analysis and is the author of hundreds of scientific papers, once offered in the 1970's to eat as much Plutonium as the liar Nader would eat of cyanide.

Unfortunately for the history of the future world, the liar Nader declined. We would have been rid of him and we would still have Bernard L. Cohen.

Don't worry about the Neptune mission though. Ignorance has prevailed; science is dying; and the mission won't happen. It's now just all a wistful dream.

[EVDebs]

2. We can't even afford the Mars crap Bush put out there how are we

supposed to afford this planetary b.s. while we're staring at multi-trillion dollar Medicare/Medicaid unfunded obligations ?

Please, one man mission to Pluto with one-way passenger Bush. O.K. ?