NASA canceled Wednesday's launch of the U.S. space agency's first probe to Pluto after the mission control headquarters in Maryland lost power, officials said, according to Reuters. The launch of the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft on a massive Atlas 5 rocket had been postponed from Tuesday due to high winds at the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. NASA officials said it was not immediately clear why mission control at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory nearly 1,000 miles (1600 km) away in Maryland lost power. The agency hoped the problem would be resolved in time for the next launch window between 1:08 p.m. and 3:07 p.m. (1808 GMT and 2007 GMT) on Thursday. NASA has until Feb. 14 to launch the probe, but postponements could add up to 5 years to its journey. The earliest that New Horizons can reach Pluto, if it launches in time to slingshot itself off the gravity field of Jupiter, is July 2015. The Applied Physics Laboratory designed and put together the half-ton satellite. As Pluto is too far from the sun for the spacecraft to tap solar energy, it will draw power from the natural decay of 24 pounds (11 kg) of plutonium pellets that are contained in an on-board generator. Twenty-four previous space missions have used radioactive plutonium as power sources, and NASA says the risks of contamination in the case of an accident during launch are minimal. More than two dozen radiation sensors and 16 teams of safety experts have been deployed to monitor the launch. The $700-million project will be NASA's first mission to Pluto, the only unexplored planet in the solar system.
