OPAG Reports, Formal proposals/evaluations of future outer SS missions |
OPAG Reports, Formal proposals/evaluations of future outer SS missions |
Nov 9 2007, 08:28 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/announcements.html
That's one little URL with a lifetime's worth of reading material. Three detailed studies are available in PDF format. The missing body is Titan, which will be the subject of a forthcoming report. The three focus missions are: Europa Explorer: Fairly detailed description of a mission that is pretty much what Europa Orbiter would have been. Jupiter System Observer: Basically, Galileo 2 (without the antenna mishap!). The craft would start with a 3-year tour of all the Galileans, then spend 1 year in an elliptical Ganymede orbit, then the rest of the mission in a tight, polar Ganymede orbit (like MGS at Mars). That would map the heck out of Ganymede, but also be close enough to the rest of the system to make long-range observations for years. Note that Ganymede would thereby provide a lot of radiation shielding. Enceladus: where three profiles are examined in depth: Enceladus Orbiter only; Enceladus Orbiter with soft lander; Saturn orbiter with Enceladus soft lander. There's more to chew on here than I have had (or may ever have) time for, but I'll throw in my two cents' worth: Seems like a Europa-only mission would only benefit from coming after a JSO. EE would explore Europa much better than JSO would; why even have JSO observations at Europa if EE came first? In many ways, these two missions are competitive. EE would have the big payoff, but JSO seems like basic recon that would prime EE, especially giving specs on radar performance. But if we waited til JSO was 4 years into its mission before completing design of EE, then put EE sometime mid-century. If an Enceladus mission included a Saturn orbiter, then maybe the same orbiter could provide data relay for separate Titan elements. However, a lot of the Enceladus science goals would require an Enceladus orbiter, so I don't think a Saturn orbiter for Enceladus/Titan will win out. Note that Enceladus orbital velocity is low enough that the craft could manage to take lots of hits from ice pellets and survive. Put a bulletproof vest on the craft and let it soar through the plumes endlessly. |
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Nov 20 2007, 10:22 AM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1870 Joined: 20-February 05 Member No.: 174 |
(Without reading the voluminous material on the opag site...)
Would a JSO mission have a higher angular resolution camera than Cassini's narrow angle cam?... Would it be a multi-megapixel camera, 4-megapixel camera on Rosetta, or even higher pixel-count-format? Would it be able to take images every few seconds, rather than about one per minute?... Would it have many times more data storage than Cassini, and be able to dump it all to Earth during apoapsis, as it heads in for the next encounter? As Meriner 10 approached and receeded from Mercury, it "fireshosed" the illuminated disk with continuous mosaicing until the field of view and frame rate became too small and slow to get contiguous coverage. Voyager was somewhat able to do the same at Jupiter with the flyby-targeted moons. Galileo was a salvage job.. very successful, but still a salvage job. A current technology mission should be able to saturate-cover the illuminated disc with multi-spectral images down to maybe 1/4 kilometer with higher camera resolution from long range, a faster frame rate, and more data storage and transmission capability. Maybe even UV/VIS/NIR color coverage at that resolution. During near-encounter, they should be able to do "quadrangle-maps" of target regions with several strips of contiguouis images down to something like 50 meters, much the way Viking Orbiters mapped landing sites with the twin rapid-fire framing cameras and it's scan platform. I'm not going to vote on Europa vs Jovian System, but we damn near better be able to do as much better at Jupiter than Cassini does at Saturn, as Cassini did over poor Galileo. Beyond that... Near Infrared imaging is vastly advanced over Cassini's technology level.. A megapixel 1 to 5 <maybe> micrometer framing camera with a good set of wide and narrow band filters should be state-of-the-art and extend multispectal mapping at good resolution to longer, more diagnostic wavelengths. |
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Nov 20 2007, 02:33 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 706 Joined: 22-April 05 Member No.: 351 |
I'm not going to vote on Europa vs Jovian System, but we damn near better be able to do as much better at Jupiter than Cassini does at Saturn, as Cassini did over poor Galileo. Even if Galileo's antenna had deployed, there would be a good reason to have the next Jovian flagship mission be able to do good Jovian system science. Galileo's instruments were mid-1970's vintage. Thirty years of instrument development would vastly improve our ability to tackle a number of questions. -------------------- |
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