CAPE CANAVERAL, Jan 19: The world’s first mission to Pluto blasted into space on Thursday on an Atlas 5 unmanned rocket to begin a nine-year journey to the only unexplored planet in the solar system. After two days of delays due to poor weather and a power outage, the 60-metre rocket, built by Lockheed Martin Corp, lifted off at 1900 GMT from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

High winds at the Florida launch site forced the first scrub of the launch of the New Horizons spacecraft on Tuesday, followed on Wednesday by a storm-triggered power outage at the mission control centre in Laurel, Maryland.

With an unprecedented five solid-fuel strap-on boosters, the rocket sent the relatively tiny spacecraft into space faster than any object launched by man before. It sprinted into the sky and quickly disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean.

“The five solid rocket boosters are burning just fine, sending the New Horizons spacecraft on its way to the very edge of our solar system,” said launch commentator Bruce Buckingham, shortly after the liftoff.

The launch sparked a small protest and was overseen by the Department of Energy because the spacecraft carried 10.9kgs of radioactive plutonium that will decay over time, providing heat that the probe’s generator can turn into electricity to power instruments and systems.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has used the non-weapons grade plutonium, processed into ceramic pellets, for 24 previous science missions which, like New Horizons, travel too far to tap the sun’s energy for solar power.

NASA chose the largest expendable rocket in the its fleet to get the New Horizons spacecraft moving as quickly as possible on its 4.9 billion-km journey to Pluto. After additional boosts by two upper-stage motors, the probe was expected to move at 57,934kph.

Next year, the spacecraft is expected to pick up an additional 14,483kph by bouncing off Jupiter’s massive gravity field for a slingshot manoeuvre toward Pluto. Even so, it will take New Horizons until July 2015 to reach Pluto and its largest moon, Charon.

Pluto is the largest and best known of a relatively new type of planetary body called a Kuiper Belt object. The Kuiper Belt is located beyond Neptune’s orbit, which is 30 times farther away from the sun than Earth. It contains frozen objects believed to be leftover remains from the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.

While not much is known about Pluto, by the time the probe arrives, scien-

tists may have a better idea of what to look for. A capsule containing samples of a Kuiper Belt-formed comet were returned to Earth on Sunday.

“For all the ideas and theories that people might have, we have some real ground truth,” said University of Washington’s Donald Brownlee, the principal investigator for the so-called Stardust mission.

“We have some actual samples of the material that the solar system was formed from,” he said. —Reuters