How Long Does It Take To Travel To Pluto?

On average, our Pluto is approximately 3.7 billion miles away from our planet. Given that range, one may ask how long it takes to travel to such a destination using a spacecraft. The answer is contingent on the technology that is available for providing propulsive force and the path selected. Now let us find out what it takes to travel the vast distance to this far-off dwarf planet.

Faster Than Ever Before: The Speediest Mission To Date

To date, only a single probe has flown by Pluto and that is NASA’s New Horizons. This was a robotic probe that was launched in January 2006 and it took over 3.2 billion years to have a close flyby of Pluto and its moons in July 2015. In total, the flight time was approximately 9.5 years.

New Horizons is another spacecraft that was sent to Pluto and it took the shortest record time to get there. It achieved this through acquiring a gravitational assist from Jupiter’s gravity during the journey. This slingshot effect enabled the probe to add more velocity and reduce time of travel by about 3 to 4 years.

At one way of about 10 years, it can be seen that Pluto is not exactly a close weekend getaway. How does this travelling time look in terms of some hypothetical future missions? What are the exact times according to the scientists, which could be the fastest?

How quickly could Astronomers get a Spacecraft to the dwarf planet Pluto?

With the conventional chemical rockets, which use the propellants carried onboard, it probably would not be possible to do better than New Horizons’ ten years of travel. However, there are some new propulsion systems that are under development and they can make the trip faster.

Nuclear-Powered Ion Engines:

Ion engines are useful in-space propulsion systems as they accelerate charged particles away from the back using electrical power. Nuclear reactors could supply them with the steady stream of power that they require for years. This combination could allow getting to Pluto in trip times of around 5 to 7 years.

Solar Sails:

Predominantly solar photon powered, mega thin sails that get momentum could work as low thrust but high efficiency drives. For the use of Jupiter for slingshot maneuvers, the experts opine that a solar sail spacecraft is capable of reaching Pluto in less than five years.

Faster trajectories may also assist in reducing the travel time taken by the vehicle. Some minor optimizations other than the Hohmann transfer orbit New Horizons used could be achieved by precisely aiming the relative positions of the planets for gravity assists.

However, chemical rockets and ion drives are still dependent on reaction mass and are thus still constrained by the rocket equation. Solar sails avoid this constraint because they do not need to store their ‘fuel’, while they deliver very low thrust. What about hypothetical propulsion methods that could give high energy efficiency as well as high thrust?

Reaching Pluto in Under a Year: The Final Outcome

Certain new-age propulsion systems under development could allow the capability to reach Pluto in days rather than years or months. These include:

Nuclear Pulse Propulsion: Interplanetary spacecraft was designed to include a number of atom bombs, which would be set off and give the ship a ride on the back of the blast. This method could enable a trip time to Pluto of under a year.

Antimatter Rockets: Even if we could create and store antimatter fuel (which is still a very big if), the tremendous energy released when antimatter comes into contact with normal matter would theoretically be enough to push a ship at 10-20% the speed of light. At this velocity, Pluto could be reached in just 2 to 5 months and it would take less than a year.

Although still a few centuries away, it is one of the most rewarding motives of exploring antimatter production and storage technology – making interstellar travel within the human lifespan possible. Supporting this advanced propulsion research now means the seeds for something big will be sown in the future.

The Bottom Line...For Now

Exploring the boundless space in our solar system comes with many technical difficulties. Until new revolutionary propulsion systems are developed and are available for implementation we are restricted to trajectory travel times of years or more using better versions of conventional chemical and nuclear rockets.

However, if the experience of space exploration in the past half-century has shown anything, it is that when science and engineering come together and find a way to push the boundaries of what’s possible, remarkable progress can be made in a relatively short amount of time. If the current level of commitment is sustained, there may be a time when commerce between planets is as normal as commerce between countries. For those future explorers, perhaps one day even tiny,far-flung Pluto may practically be just around the corner.

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