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_*]

BESIDES all that, there was one other major problem that Griffin didn't mention and which would unique to JIMO among all NEP missions: the fact that it would simultaneously have had to be designed with new radiation-proof electronics for its Europa-orbiting mission. Jupiter's charged-particle radiation presents an entirely different kind of problem for electronics than the neutrons emitted by a nuclear reactor, and in any case the radiation from the latter -- on the end of a long boom, and with its own shield -- would be trivial in relative dosage anyway. Indeed, Jupiter's own radiation would seriously complicate the design of the reactor's own control electronics. This whole big problem, as I say, was unique to the JIMO proposal, and is further proof that it could have been advocated only by someone who didn't know anything whatsoever about actual engineering and could thus get suckered by dishonest underlings -- namely, O'Keefe.