There are plenty of crazy ideas for missions in the space exploration community. Some are just better funded than others. One of the early pathways to funding the crazy ideas is NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts. In 2017 and again in 2021, it funded a mission study of what most space enthusiasts would consider only a modestly ambitious goal but what those outside the community might consider outlandish—landing on Pluto.
Pluto has an atmosphere, albeit sparse, as confirmed by the New Horizons mission that whizzed past in 2015. One advantage of the minor planet’s relatively weak gravity is that its low-density atmosphere is almost eight times larger than Earth’s, providing a much bigger target for a fast incoming aerobraking craft to aim for.Much of the NIAC Phase I project was focused on the details of that aerobraking system, called the Enveloping Aerodynamic Decelerator .
Hoppers have become increasingly popular as an exploration tool everywhere, from the Moon to asteroids. Some apparent advantages would include visiting a wide array of interesting scientific sites and not having to navigate tricky land-based obstacles. Ingenuity, the helicopter that accompanied Perseverance paved the way for the idea, but in other words, the atmosphere isn’t dense enough to support a helicopter.
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