New Pluto mission could uncover dwarf planet's hidden ocean.

When NASA's New Horizons spacecraft sped by Pluto in 2015, it revealed an incredible world of ice and haze carved by various geological processes — hinting that an ocean may have played a role in the dwarf planet's recent history. The bounty of scientific riches has left researchers working to solve some of the tiny world's mysteries a decade after the spacecraft's flyby.

"There's still a lot of questions that are open," Carly Howett, a planetary scientist at the University of Oxford and a New Horizons team member, said last month at the Progress in Understanding the Pluto Mission: 10 Years after Flyby conference in Laurel, Maryland. With such questions lingering, Howett and her colleagues designed a follow-up mission in hopes of finally solving some of Pluto's mysteries.

Such a mission, sent to investigate the outskirts of the solar system, would span several decades. But it's far from being approved. "This mission could operate for over 50 years, challenging engineering, mission operations, and data analysis in ways that have never been done before," Howett wrote in a 2021 study published in the Planetary Science Journal detailing the mission concept.

Source: www.space.com

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