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.)

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Well, I can give you the full instrument list (although not in much detail):

(1) Multi-channel microwave spectrometer (for very deep temperature, water vapor and ammonia profiles).

(2) UV imaging spectrometer (another version of the "ALICE" on Rosetta and New Horizons).

(3) Magnetometer

(4) Plasma detector ("JADE", or Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment).

(5) Energetic particle detector

(6) Plasma wave detector

(7) Camera

Plus the radio science experiment -- which is actually the most important one on Juno, with the possible exception of the microwave spectrometer and magnetometer, given its ability to make gravity-field measurements so precise that they will settle both the question of whether Jupiter has a rocky core, but even detect the convection currents from very deep winds.

Nothing in there for images, except for the camera itself and ALICE (plus whatever maps they get out of the microwave instrument). As I say, this is a very important mission scientifically -- giving us our deepest look yet into Jupiter's innards -- but it won't have much charm for nonscientists.