PLUTÃO
SIGNAL 98.2% · DSN CANBERRA UNMAPPED · FAR SIDE

EARTH · 34.9 AU FROM TARGET · 2026

PLUTÃO

AI-driven space exploration.
The far edge, closer than you think.

Join the mission Programs

01 · MISSION

We teach machines to navigate the dark.

Four light-hours from the nearest human, a probe can't wait for instructions. Plutão builds onboard intelligence — perception, planning, and fault recovery that run 5.2 billion kilometers from mission control.

No hands on deck. No windows. Just models that see in the dark and decide before dawn does.

MISSION LOG
  • T+00:00:00LAUNCH · ATLAS V 551 · CCAFS SLC-41
  • T+00:45:12SIGNAL ACQUIRED · DSN CANBERRA
  • T+405:09:47JUPITER GRAVITY ASSIST · Δv 3.8 KM/S
  • T+3637:11:49PLUTO ENCOUNTER · CLOSEST APPROACH
  • T+3638:04:10SCIENCE TRIAGE · 41 TARGETS QUEUED
DISTANCE TO TARGET
0B KM
ONE-WAY LIGHT DELAY
0H
SURFACE TEMPERATURE
0K
PLUTO DIAMETER
0KM

02 · THE HEART

Nine billion kilometers away, there is a heart.

Frozen nitrogen, shaped like a valentine — Tombaugh Regio, the bright heart New Horizons photographed in 2015. It is the smoothest surface in the solar system, and the reason we do this.

We're going back. And this time, we're staying.

FIELD ARCHIVE · NEW HORIZONS · 2015

03 · PROGRAMS

Three systems. One autonomous mission.

PRG-01 · VISION

Deep vision in permanent dusk

Neural perception tuned for 4-watt sunlight: terrain mapping, hazard detection and landing site selection at 40 Kelvin, no uplink required.

01
PRG-02 · AUTONOMY

Planning across a 5-hour delay

Onboard planners that replan when the world changes faster than light. Science triage, fault recovery, and 9 years of silence handled gracefully.

02
PRG-03 · RELAY

A relay that never blinks

Constellation architecture for the Kuiper belt: laser crosslinks, cryo-stable avionics, and bandwidth shared like it matters. Because it does.

03

04 · ROADMAP

Four burns. One horizon.

  1. 2029

    Launch window

    The next Jupiter-assist alignment opens. Atlas V class vehicle, cryo-stable avionics, perception stack frozen two years early for a 15-year cruise.

  2. 2030

    Jupiter gravity assist

    One year out, Jupiter bends the trajectory and buys four years. The probe wakes monthly to sweep the dark for the unknown.

  3. 2044

    Pluto orbit insertion

    14 years of silence end. Optical crosslink to the relay constellation goes live — 1,000× New Horizons' 2 kbps downlink.

  4. 2046

    Heart landing

    Descent to Sputnik Planitia. A seismometer listens to the nitrogen glacier convect, and an autonomous lander stays through the 248-year winter.

05 · THE STACK

How the brain gets built.

Plutão's autonomy stack is trained on Earth, hardened for the dark, and shipped as frozen weights. Five stages. One rule: the spacecraft must survive everything we failed to simulate.

  1. 01

    Corpus

    Every Pluto map ever made — New Horizons LORRI/MVIC, Hubble albedo, ground radar — plus synthetic terrain rendered under our lighting models, down to metre-scale craters.

    IN: 14 PB · 9M FRAMES
  2. 02

    Digital twin

    A physics-honest twin of Pluto: 44 K thermal cycling, sublimation slopes, kilometer-scale terrain. Policies train for 9 mission-years of failure before they see real vacuum.

    9.4M SIM LANDINGS
  3. 03

    Distillation

    40B-parameter teachers distilled into a 1.2B flight brain, quantized INT4 and formally verified against the fault-protection contract.

    40B → 1.2B · INT4
  4. 04

    Flight

    Dual-redundant rad-hard compute, 0.5 W inference budget. The planner outranks the ground: if telemetry disagrees with Earth, telemetry wins.

    0.5 W · 99.97% FDIR
  5. 05

    Learning loop

    New terrain becomes new training data. Patches go up on the next pass; the twin on Earth re-syncs nightly. Human-on-the-loop, never in it.

    PATCH EVERY 3.2 DAYS

06 · CONTACT

Ready to leave the flat world?

Applications open with the 2029 launch window. Until then — watch the sky, and mind the gaps between stars.

COMMS WINDOW OPENS 2029