Pluto mission with lander, rover, and Orbiter developement

[Guest]

This is a thread that talks about how the development of Pluto missions would be interesting.

Me myself I am working on my own spacecraft. I'm working on looking at what materials would make a good mission.

PLEASE ONLY POST

• Past Pluto Missions
• News about missions
• the tech that would help push on the development of the future pluto spacecraft
• How would humans survive
• Or anything else of space exploration with pluto

[Cunjo Carl]

To get the conversation rolling, here's a mission study from '04 for a Pluto Orbiter. It measured in at a massive 510kg drymass and unsurprisingly used ion thrusters for the insertion burn with 4 RTGs to provide power! It would also utilize a Jupiter gravity assist and apparently spend a lot of the time between Jupiter and Pluto with the thrusters on (red regions), which gives an idea of the amount of deltaV needed for the insertion burn. Unfortunately, the assist was in 2018 so a little on the late side... Still, it's a great looking starting point!

Pluto Orbiter Probe Study

Ion Engines (T5 on page 7)

   

Edited May 2, 2019 by Cunjo Carl

[wumpus]

• the tech that would help push on the development of the future pluto spacecraft
• How would humans survive

 

You've pretty much posted the tech needed for such a thing.  Ion thrusters powered by nuclear energy.  Gravity assists are always a good idea as well.

Humans aren't coming along, that just is ridiculous (at least until people are being born on permanent Mars colonies or similar).  The journey out is years and trying to leave via ion thrusters would take forever (just to get back to Jupiter for your trip home).  While you won't have to deal with the rocket equation (lots of delta-v needed to get back) the mass of the life support and habitation units would be far to much for the wimpy ion thrusters to accelerate at all.

If you want to force humans along, you have pretty much the same problems as going to Mars, only much, much worse.  I'd recommend (for either "planet") sticking refilling stations in one or more elliptical orbits to leave Earth (and at least on the target "planet" for the return flight), all delivered via ions or similar.  The humans would then use a spacecraft powered by chemicals (at least to escape velocity) by "Pe kicking" (aka the Mangalyaan maneuver) by docking with the successive refilling stations (at Ap) and burning at Pe.  Expect to still use ions (or perhaps some slightly more powerful thruster) past Jupiter and to capture.  I think this is a good plan for Mars, a silly plan for Pluto.

[DDE]

Bada-boom?

[magnemoe]

Easiest relatively short term way to throw an multi ton payload at the required speeds needed would be to add some stages to Starship. 
Payload with orbiter and lander(s) and rover. One or two hypergolic stages for braking, uppermost stage might be part of orbiter. 
One LOX / methane stage for pushing, this stage and starship is refueled in orbit, this stage itself will be 3-500 ton filled.
Do an GTO style burn with starship and let payload and upper stages continue, pusher stage does its burn and get dropped.  
Starship return to earth. 
Option to use LOX / methane for braking but more complex as you need to keep it cold until out of inner solar system, you also has the rocket equation.  

Prefer this idea over Musks disposable starship as it should give more dV and don't cost an starship, just an raptor engine.  

[DDE]

20 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Option to use LOX / methane for braking but more complex as you need to keep it cold until out of inner solar system

I wonder what they were getting wrong in the "deep space storeables" research of the early 1970s, when they were toying with ethane and gelling fluorine with ClF3 bubbles. Back then, I think they outright assumed methane would stay put in deep space.

[MaverickSawyer]

I'm with DDE on Ol' Boom-Boom. That's the ticket to the whole solar system.