In the press conference, the PI was asked about a future mission. He said that he has thought about orbiters and landers and considers the Pluto system to be a valuable science target. But he said that we need to study the New Horizons data for some years, to better design the next mission. At this time, they wouldn't know what the best instruments to send would be. Also, it is far from clear how to send a mission to Pluto that takes a reasonable amount of time to get there (9 years, in the case of New Horizons) but can also stop when it gets there. Cassini took almost seven years to reach Saturn and the orbital insertion burn was something like ninety minutes! I'm not sure how fast it was going at the time, compared to New Horizons at Pluto, but the point is, if you want to get there quickly, you go fast, but then it's hard to stop.
> At this time, they wouldn't know what the best instruments to send would be.
There's an interesting BBC documentary series on the planets, called The Planets, that has an episode covering the Voyager probes. They had to do some quick redesigns on them after Pioneer 10 and 11 visited the outer planets and found fun stuff like radiation and unexpected rings. They said that if they hadn't had the earlier probes, Voyager would have been fried when it got to the system.
I second that recommendation, and it's currently on Netflix. It's a good documentary series. A little long in the tooth now, but only for the entirely positive reason that we've done a fair bit more planetary science since it was made.
