Nasa in second attempt to launch Pluto spacecraft

Bad weather forced Nasa to cancel the launch of an unmanned spacecraft on a nine-year, 3-billion-mile voyage to Pluto, the solar system’s last unexplored planet.

The launch of the New Horizons probe from Cape Canaveral, Florida, was cancelled yesterday afternoon after winds at the launch pad exceeded the space agency’s 38 mph flight restriction.

Nasa planned to try again today.

“The winds picked up sooner than expected,” said MIT scientist Richard Binzel, one of the mission’s investigators. “Blame the meteorologists.”

A successful journey to Pluto would complete an exploration of the planets started by Nasa in the early 1960s with unmanned missions to observe Mars, Mercury and Venus.

Pluto is an oddball icy dwarf unlike the rocky planets of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars and the gaseous planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

It also is the brightest body in a zone of the solar system known as the Kuiper Belt, made up of thousands of icy, rocky objects, including tiny planets whose development was stunted by unknown causes.

Scientists believe studying those “planetary embryos” can help them understand how planets were formed.

The New Horizons spacecraft will be launched on an Atlas V rocket that will accelerate away from Earth at 36,000 mph the fastest launch speed on record.

Once launched, the craft was expected to reach Earth’s moon in about nine hours and arrive in 13 months at Jupiter, where it will use the giant planet’s gravity as a slingshot, shaving five years off the trip.