Our next question comes from Junichi from Japan.
Is New Horizons spacecraft going to drop a lander on the surface of Pluto and/or Charon to explore them?
Well, the answer is no. A lander would take extra mass in the spacecraft launch mass. It takes a lot of energy to get a spacecraft to Pluto.
Any additional lander or anything else we put on the spacecraft would make it that much harder to get there when we want to get there.
And, in fact, we can accomplish all the science we need to accomplish without a lander, with
just the instrument complement that we have onboard right now.
And the other thing is that a lander adds an extra degree of complexity to the mission, and you try to
keep things as simple as possible in order to achieve your scientific goals.