Nasa Picks "juno" As Next New Frontiers Mission Options

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2005/jun/H...rontiers_2.html

Yeah, I know it ain't Saturn, but we don't seem to have any proper slot for Jovian news -- including yesterday's totally unexpected announcement that Amalthea's density is so low as to suggest that it's a highly porous ice object; maybe a captured Kuiper Belt Object reduced to rubble by infalling meteoroids. As Jason Perry says, this might explain those previously mysterious light-colored patches on Amalthea -- they may be its underlying ice, exposed by impacts that punched through the layer of sulfur spray-painted onto it by Io.

Scott Bolton has been pretty talkative to me already about the design of Juno. It certainly won't be as good in the PR department as Galileo or Cassini, but it DOES carry a camera -- as much for PR as for Jovian cloud science, according to Bolton. And since the latitude of periapsis of its highly elliptical orbit will change radically during the primary mission, I wonder if they might be able to set up at least one close photographic flyby of Io and/or Amalthea? (I believe, by the way, that this selection is a bit ahead of schedule -- and it certainly indicates that NASA's science program under Griffin won't be a complete slave to Bush's Moon-Mars initiative.)

[edstrick]

Atmosphere sounding instruments can also return very interesting images, witness infrared imaging spectrometers on Cassini and Galileo.

Also, some non-imaging instruments return truely spectacular images. The MOLA laser altimeter on Mars Global Surveyor is a non-imaging instrument, and it's "primary" data pre-flight tended to be described as the surface profiles from single passes, but the dense coverage it returned of altimetry data, *WITHOUT* gross artifacts in the form of pass-to-pass striping or the like results in truely spectacular images of Mars topography.

We'll see what we might make from non-imaging instruments that are interesting, when we have a payload list and some instrument details.