Maybe nasaspaceflight.com...

I don't know the orbit mechanics of whether a direct flight if launched now could beat Clipper to Jupiter (or whether Starship could propel a large enough craft with fuel to be interesting).

EC most definitely is essential to provide the best achievable decision data needed before designing & greenlighting any surface mission.

A lingering curiosity for me was, how does Europa Clipper facilitate the next mission at Europa?

Unfortunately, given the distance and lack of relay, it won't be the bounty of images from the Mars rovers.

Though I could do without the animated GIFs…

It's a real shame we don't have the people to migrate to and maintain phpBB/simple machines/whatever.

The Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus in 1986 revealed an unusually oblique and off-centred magnetic field. This single in situ measurement has been the basis of our interpretation of Uranus’s magnetosphere as the canonical extreme magnetosphere of the solar system; with inexplicably intense electron radiation belts and a severely plasma-depleted magnetosphere. However, the role of external forcing by the solar wind has rarely been considered in explaining these observations. Here we revisit the Voyager 2 dataset to show that Voyager 2 observed Uranus’s magnetosphere in an anomalous, compressed state that we estimate to be present less than 5% of the time.

I'm also going to reach out to the server hosts to asks if they can snapshot the entire system and send it to me in some way come the shutdown at the end of Dec.

If I understand correctly, launching at the start (or end) of the launch window usually requires slightly more fuel for trajectory corrections (esp. long burns like deep space maneuvers).

At the very least, a dump of all the attachments and the fairly modest sized SQL DB that drives the place are easy 'gets' which I would zip up and throw on archive.org - you're right that their waybackmachine snapshots are marginal at best.

I've wondered about NSF whether any of the planetary science threads are paywalled.

We will attempt to archive the forum as best we can around the beginning of December and upload it to archive.org...

As soon as we had learned that there might be an issue with our
transistors, which was back at the beginning of May at JPL, we moved
quickly as a project and as a lab and agency with our partners as well
to quickly analyze the risks and conduct tests. [We] generated
tremendous amount of data. We know a lot about the the Jupiter
radiation environment from previous NASA missions including the
current Juno Mission which is at Jupiter right now.

We completed extensive testing to validate the transistors on the
spacecraft. We ran tests 24 hours a day over the last four months at
multiple locations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, at the Applied
Physics Laboratory and at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. We
simulated flight like conditions to illuminate any issues that the
transistors might have over our four-year science Mission across the
variety of applications we have on the spacecraft.

We put these representative transistors into these environments,
radiated entire circuits and to see how the system behaves and not
just the transistors themselves. We looked at transistor temperatures
while the spacecraft was outside of Jupiter's most intense radiation
environment to determine how much recovery we might be able to get
from these transistors while we're not in that intense radiation
environment. After each flyby we've replicated that transistor
self-healing, or annealing as it's called, that occurs by heating them
to room temperature while they they essentially rest far from that
intense radiation environment as we go around each orbit of Jupiter
before [coming back to] Europa again.

The underlying issue was that there was a gap in how industry
qualifies the kind of hardware like MOSFETS for high radiation
environments. The parts in question, the semiconductor in the
transistors are cut from silicon wafers and those silicon wafers met
the radiation hardness requirements that we needed, but then those
semiconductor Wafers degraded while in storage. We concluded after
all of this testing um that during our orbits around Jupiter while
Europa Clipper does dip into the radiation environment, once it comes
out it comes out long enough for those transistors the opportunity to
heal and partially recover between flybys. we're going to continue to
closely monitor the both the radiation environment we have a radiation
monitor on board as well as the performance of the transistors from
the ground once we are in flight and once we arrive at the Jupiter
system to accomplish this. we've received help from many corners
including the vendor. the vendor's been immensely proactive and
helpful throughout all of our work.

To reiterate what's already been said we can and I have very high
confidence, and the data bears it out, complete the original mission
which is 49 flybys of Europa and amounts to 80 orbits of Jupiter...

As Jordan said, they have margin and we have no reason to to expect
anything other than a great four years and an extended mission beyond
that.

I see also that that source tested uncharged electromagnetic radiation while the Jupiter environment has charged particles, including of masses that you'd rarely see on Earth. And one of the hazards of the jovian environment is that sustained dosage of charged particles can cause charge buildup, and destructive discharge arcs.

For the news to raise that concern about the MOSFETs, followed by weeks without an update seems like a disconnect, at least as far as communications go.

An editorial by David Southwood about MSR has appeared in Science. It doesn't try to go deep on technical or scientific details, but has thoughtful commentary on process and the path forward.