Well, they got some pretty representative areas, though they missed the highlights. In fact, a lot of interesting things are in the images - a multitude of valleys, one end of Valles Marineris, the white rock, the south polar region. The problem is that the resolution/dynamic range of the images was in many cases not good enough to spot or to interpret the features, and also the lack of context for many images led to features not being understood. It is true that a nice shot of central Valles Marineris or a near encounter view of one of the volcanoes in Tharsis would have helped, and to have missed those features was truly bad luck (although not too surprising, given the amount of coverage they got). However, the idea that the first three Mariners, and I am especially referring to 6 and 7 simply photographed the most boring places on the planet is grossly overstated.

Only one I was going to add was Mariner 1. Maybe the whole problem was the naming system. ;-)

--Greg

Pity we can't get the EU to just pony up the difference. "The same great space probe, but at HALF the price! You can't walk away from this deal!" :-)

I suppose that'd still be twice what they were prepared to pay . . .

--Greg

If NASA puts in $2B (which I hear is the target amount), then ESA would need to put in $1B for a duplicate Europa orbiter. Given the direction of the dollar, this becomes easier day by day. However, the bigger problem is the duplicate launch vehicle. Since these launcher are near copies of each other, as I understand it, then cost of duplicates has already been amortized. As I remember the Flagship reports, the #1 factor in reducing costs is to get on a smaller launcher. (One of my previous posts has the numbers.) I'm not sure what ESA and NASA are considering for the Jovian mission in terms of launch vehicles. Do they launch together or separately? I also wonder if JAXA would be interested in providing a smaller orbiter for magnetosphere studies a la La Place.

According to the Laplace mission summary, the Europa Orbiter would launch separately along with a possible surface component. The Jupiter Planetary Orbiter (provided by ESA) would launch along with the Jupiter Magnetospheric Orbiter (provided by JAXA).

A comparatively simple orbiter doesn't make much sense for duplicating imho. We didn't need a second MRO or MGS or MEX or VEX. If you're going do do redundency, do it for the highest risk parts, or where you visit two different places in doing so ( i.e. MER put the chance to visit two sites against halving the risk of a total failure, Voyager's visited/images different parts of moons). I don't think a second MRO would give double the science value. Better planning and a greater range of spacial, temporal and wavelength of instruments with one vehicle makes more sense for an orbiter imho. If you're building two of something, make it impactors, landers, atmospheric probes of some sort - the higher risk part of the equation. i.e. Don't build two Cassini's - build one Cassini and put two Huygens on it.

And the value of the dollar doesn't really factor in. ESA wouldn't be giving NASA any cash, these things can not (and rightly so) work that way. It would cost ESA pretty much the same, in real terms, to build a spacecraft if the dollar was at 50 cents to the euro or 2 dollars to the euro.

Doug

Redundancy in this case would be one orbiter for Europa and one for Ganymede.

My guess, reading between the lines of the one sentence comment in the Flagship assessment and the LaPlace proposal, is that the ESA craft is a Jovian orbiter that does repeated Ganymede flybys. Not orbiting Ganymede saves a tremendous amount of fuel and reduces the instrument list considerably (radar probably isn't very useful, for example). This might reduce costs enough to fit into ESA's budget. The box studies last year found that even simple Jovian moon orbiters were well in excess of $1B. Since Euros spent in Europe purchase roughly what dollars spent in the US purchase, ESA has ~$8-900M in purchasing power. (Exact comparisons are hard because of different accounting systems and trying to determine local purchasing power is not exact.)

A Jovian orbiter with a really good (i.e, big, Deep Frontiers or HiRise) class could do a lot of Jovian and Io science. The apparently fairly small camera proposed for La Place appears from the mass summary to be in the New Horizons class, which would be much less capable.

Anyone know if there is a spare of the Deep Impact camera system?

The one that was out of focus?



Doug

Yeah, that one. Bet the duplicate could be focused on the ground before launch!

It is tough to know just what 700 million Euros will buy on a mission like this. Several things about ESA make apple to apple comparisions with the US rather dicey.

It was on this forum that I first heard that ESA planetary missions do not factor in the cost of instruments directly. If I'm understanding that correctly it means that the 700 million Euros goes for the launch vehicle, spacecraft, and possibly operation costs, but does not include the instruments. That has got to be giving you a healthy boost on effective budge (I'm thinking an insturment suite for this mission could run 50-100 million Eurios).

Secondly, there is the European aversion to nuclear power on their spacecraft (largely a political hot potato, I think). I think most of the Billion Dollar Box studies that NASA did envisioned nuclear powered shipts. Not sure if solar power would be cheaper or not, but in any event the Europeans do not always think the same way that the JPL engineers do (for better or worse) and it's tough to be sure that the studies we did on outer planet orbiters would be directly applicable.

When I read read the Laplace Report (a long time back, memory is vague) it struck me that they were coming up with missions very different from our concepts, and were estimating much smaller vehicles (launched on a Soyuz) and cheaper costs.

It will be very interesting to see how these design studies turn out.

I agree on the problems of comparing funding. However, I don't think the ESA budget can be stretched to match the capabilities of the box study. Some ways that come to mind to cut costs would be to use solar power, reduce the size of the launcher (I don't think we can fit both mass of the ESA and NASA craft into the same launcher, but I hope I'm wrong), reduce the instrument compliment, and stay away from high radiation fields. I expect that this is the plan for the ESA craft, with the big open question being whether they plan to orbit Ganymede. A smaller open question is whether they will take on the costs of having a spacecraft with the pointing accuracy and stability for a really big camera.

In general, the LaPlace instruments weigh much less than the Europa orbiter instruments. In general, that means less capable science but lower development and testing costs, lighter spacecraft, cheaper launcher, smaller power supply, cheaper operations, etc...

I think that we get outer planets missions so rarely and they are so expensive, that "less capable instruments" would actually be a waste of resources.

This is my opinion as well. I think we should try and cram as much science onto a single spacecraft as possible (similar to what Cassini did), not send "mediocre" instruments. If that requires several international partners, then by all means go for it. Better than sending virtually empty spacecraft buses on billion km voyages just so we can lower the price and be able to say "we've got an orbiter right there".

I'd like to register my agreement also - why take a couple of days off work to drive to Germany and do a lap of the Nurburgring in a Fiat Punto??
If you're going to send instruments all that way, make them the best.

I don't think we should send poor instruments, or vehicles with too limited a payload, but let's not fall into the opposite trap: Endlessly desigining the most capable spacecraft but never quite flying it.

One of the reasons there were no Mars missions for so many years after Viking was that many planetary scientists and engineers kept holding out for a Sample Return. On several occasions I remember reading comments from other government officials (Administration, mostly) asking essentially: "Isn't there any other cheaper Mars missions you could fly?" After nearly ten years of NASA holding out for a bigger spectacular than Viking, the Reagan Administration approved the Mars Observer orbiter... becsause NASA finally proposed something that was considered affordable.

There are many examples of this sort. Take for example the many attempts over the years to get a Pluto mission funded. Undoubtably there were many reasons it took so long, but at one point JPL actually was pushing for a Cassini class flyby spacecraft.... essentially trying to cram as much science onto a single spacecraft as possible. A single, very expensive spacecraft. What finally flew was the relatively modest New Horizons. Which, IMHO, is far better than a drawing of a really fancy Cassini class space probe.

There were many political reasons that the Europa Orbiter was killed in 2001 (not the least of which was a bruised ego of the Nasa Administrator), but I keep looking back at the strawman vehicle that was the baseline early in that mission's definition phase. It had visible light cameras, Infrared Mapping spectrometer, ice pentetrating radar, and laser altimeter. Ok, so that's rather on the low end of 'Flagship' ..... but it would have launched by 2008.

Instead we are talking about launching next flagship no earlier than 2016.

As Alan Stern has commented, (paraphrasing) " sometimes you need to settle for 70 percent of something, instead of holding out for 100 percent of nothing."