Part 2 of 3 Parts (Please read Part 2)
In order to achieve the maximum velocity possible to travel beyond the Solar System, a really powerful rocket will be required. NASA hopes to have its powerful Space Launch System (SLS) ready by 2021. It is capable of twice the thrust of the most power current launch system. The SLS would launch from Earth at about nine miles a second. It would loop around Jupiter and then plunge back into the Solar System to get a gravity boost from the Sun. Skimming through the outer atmosphere of the Sun, it would fire a second rocket which would boost its speed to around sixty miles a second. At this speed, it should reach the heliopause in about ten years.
The team working on the McNutt plan hopes that they will be able to route the probe past Uranus, Neptune or a body in Kuiper Belt know as Quaoar. Kathy Mandt is a planetary scientist who hopes that good use can be made of the time the Interstellar Probe spends in the Solar System. It might also be useful for improving the search for exoplanets. This could be accomplished by looking back at planets in the Solar System with the same equipment that is currently being used to look for exoplanets. When the probe crosses the heliopause, it can take samples of dust and particles which will aid in understanding the heliosphere and the materials that formed our Solar System.
Once beyond the protective bubble of the heliosphere, it will be able to investigate phenomena that are obscured by the heliosphere such as cosmic rays from exploding stars, light from the afterglow of the big bang, disks of debris that are forming planets around young stars and other interstellar objects and processes.
So far, the McNutt Interstellar Probe only exists as a PowerPoint Presentation. His team has received funding of around seven hundred thousand dollars from NASA for concept studies. Currently they are waiting to find out whether NASA will provide an additional six and a half million dollars over the next three years. This would permit them to draft a more detailed plan for scientific studies and a mission design document.
The critical moment for the Interstellar Probe project will arrive in 2023. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine will publish their next decadal survey for solar and space physics. These assessments are conducted every ten years under request from Congress and NASA. They are considered to be the official consensus for U.S. space science goals. They will guide NASA budgeting for the next ten years.
Richard Mewaldt is a Caltech physicist who served as chair for the solar and heliospheric physics panel during the most recent decadal survey which was published in 2013. He said, with respect to the Interstellar Probe, “It was always something we couldn’t do immediately, but set aside maybe for the future.” In the 2013 decadal document, advanced planning for an interstellar probe was ranked as the eighth among nine imperatives for NASA.
NASA has a heliophysics division which would be responsible for overseeing any interstellar missions. It receives less funding than any other NASA science division. It might help launch the Interstellar Probe mission if they could interest the planetary sciences division at NASA in flyby missions to the outer planets and/or the Kuiper Belt object. Unfortunately, the different NASA divisions are kept well separated and it is difficult to obtain funds from multiple NASA division for a single mission.
Please read Part 3 next