Nasa scraps Pluto mission launch for second day

Nasa scrubbed its launch of an unmanned spacecraft on a nine-year voyage to Pluto for the second day in a row today, but this time weather in Maryland was to blame.

A storm in Laurel, Maryland, knocked out power at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which is managing operations of the New Horizons spacecraft.

Nasa plan another attempt tomorrow. The space agency has until mid-February to launch the piano-sized spacecraft, but a launch in January would allow the spacecraft to use Jupiter’s gravity to shave five years off the three-billion-mile trip.

The launch of the New Horizons probe had been called off yesterday afternoon when winds at the launch pad in Cape Canaveral exceeded the space agency’s 38 mph flight restriction.

“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 that was 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.