NASA's Deep Space Mission Faces Controversial Changes

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which has been on a 15-year mission to study the Kuiper asteroid belt, is being redirected to study the environment at the distant reaches of the Sun instead. The change has upset the scientists in charge of the mission, who argue that it is a needless redirection of a mission almost 15 years in the making. The spacecraft has already made impressive contributions to our understanding of the solar system, but now that it has run out of Kuiper Belt Object targets for a future flyby, senior NASA scientists are having a harder time justifying future planetary science missions.