Nasa Picks "juno" As Next New Frontiers Mission |
Nasa Picks "juno" As Next New Frontiers Mission |
Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Jun 1 2005, 10:10 PM
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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.) |
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Jun 3 2005, 01:21 AM
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Jason is likely to be disappointed if he thinks of the Europa orbiter as "a 2-year Io mission with one month in Europa orbit". The plans for it, which have long ago been worked out in detail, call for it to make repeated flybys of Ganymede and Callisto during its 2-year orbital tour before settling into Europa orbit -- but NOT to get any closer to Jupiter than Europa, in order to minimize its radiation dose. The plan now is not even to have it make a close approach to Jupiter at its initial arrival -- instead, it will approach at Ganymede's distance and make a Ganymede flyby to help brake itself into Jovian orbit (rather than using Io for that purpose, as Galileo did).
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Jun 3 2005, 01:35 AM
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Senior Member Group: Moderator Posts: 3242 Joined: 11-February 04 From: Tucson, AZ Member No.: 23 |
I never thought it would actually flyby Io, given the radiation concerns. But for Io, the key need is not necessarily high spatial resolution images, but high temporal and spectral resolution observations. So even consistent observations over a 2 year span can prove VERY useful for Io science.
-------------------- &@^^!% Jim! I'm a geologist, not a physicist!
The Gish Bar Times - A Blog all about Jupiter's Moon Io |
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