March OPAG presentations available Options

[vjkane]

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/march_08_meeting/agenda.html

LOTS of interesting material here. Some highlights that interested me:

Cassini extended-extended mission (XXM) could last 7 years and end with a series of very close (10,000's km) polar orbits through the D ring gap to enable close in gravity and magnetometer mapping a la Juno

Argo proposal would be a New Horizon's class fly by of a Trojan, Saturn, Neptune/Triton, and one or more KBOs for ~$800M (but requires radioactive power source, so would seem to be out of contention for next New Frontiers)

Joint Jupiter mission design. NASA supplied Europa orbiter now required to conduct Jupiter system science including up to 4 Io flybys. To fit within the $2.1B cap (with 33% margin), Europa orbit would be reduced to 60 days and several instruments from the Flagship proposal would be dropped including the narrow angle camera)

Titan mission. Aerocapture no longer allowed, so craft would enter Saturn orbit first. Potentially allows new Enceladus observations. (Editorial note: Presentation was long on concepts, short on specifics. If this is an indication of the maturity of the mission concept, this does not bode well. I hope that this is only the style of presentation chosen by the presenter). Nature of ESA in situ probe(s) to be decided.

ESA Cosmic Vision outer planet mission. ESA is considering three missions for the next cosmic vision mission: an outer planets joint mission with NASA (Jupiter or Titan/Saturn), XEUS (X-ray observatory), or LISA (gravity wave observatory). Down select to two of the three end of '09, final single mission selected in 2011.

Radioisotope power. Lots of technical update, but a gem in the backup, the ASRG (Sterling engine) mission concepts being studied in more detail than I've seen elsewhere:

Moon polar rover (2 concepts)
Titan boat(!)
Io observer
Trojan lander
Comet lander
Comet coma rendezvou sample return
Mars lander drill ("a tour through Martian history")
Venus balloons (2)

[Roly]

Very exciting to read the OPAG reports, I look forward to them after every meeting.

I had a question regarding the descoping of the Europa Orbiter. To what extent does the deletion of the Narrow Angle Camera damage the ability to characterize the surface for a future (distant future...) lander? Is the ~10m of the Medium Angle Camera sufficient? Obviously it will do a better job than no camera at all, which sounds like the alternative.

I suspect the extended mission of the orbiter would be very limited, but if the final disposal of the spacecraft is Europa impact, could the sensor be designed to minimize smearing, perhaps allowing the return of a few very high resolution images in the final few orbits? Maybe borrowing from the experience of 'cProto' motion compensation?

It will be excellent to hear from the instrument study meeting too.

[vjkane]

I had a question regarding the descoping of the Europa Orbiter. To what extent does the deletion of the Narrow Angle Camera damage the ability to characterize the surface for a future (distant future...) lander? Is the ~10m of the Medium Angle Camera sufficient? Obviously it will do a better job than no camera at all, which sounds like the alternative.

A few months ago, I posted the attached file on resolutions of *narrow* angle cameras for the Europa Explorer and Jovian System Explorer. If the new Europa proposal is selected for the flagship and a narrow angle camera is not added back into the payload, then I believe that the resolution of the medium camera will be about 1/10 that of the EE resolution in the attached file.

Attached File(s)

 camera_resolutions.txt ( 1.47K ) Number of downloads: 427