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.)

[Redstone]

The original concept for a Europa Orbiter was not a multi-billion dollar, nuclear propulsion behemoth, but rather a <1 billion scout mission with radar and imaging capabilities. The proposed mission had overwhelming support from both the public and scientific community.

It's only because of the shortsighted, politic driven decision making that that this mission has been "on again - off again" so many times. Fortunately, NASA is not the only game in town any more. Maybe we will see an ESA Europa mission while NASA is trying to find its way.

While a NASA only Europa mission may not be "on" right now, here's another Griffin quote made to the press on May 12:

The Science Mission directorate wants to do a Europa mission, the National Academy of Sciences wants to do a Europa mission, I want to do a Europa mission. When we can afford it in the budget, we'll do it.

Sounds like a NASA mission is still on the cards, but we just need to wait a while. Remember Griffin is focussing on the manned program right now, the JUNO announcement notwithstanding. Once the ISS and CEV plans get settled in a few months, I'd expect Griffin to turn to the long-term detail of the space science program.

[Bob Shaw]

Some comments on life on Mars (and elsewhere) and on Surveyor 3:

Life isn't divided into success and failure by 'simplicity' and 'complexity' - the only 'success' is survival of the organism through it's offspring (so human intelligence and fecundity may well not be good success strategies). The sophistication of 'simple' Martian/Europan life may not be obvious to a big game hunter, but a microbiologist might well disagree. Let's not get hung up on macro-organisms!

And sadly, there's a persuasive view of the Surveyor 3 camera which suggests that the bacteria found within it were due to laboratory contamination, so the jury has to still be out on the survival of spores etc in space.

Considering the early bombardment history of the planets, plus the recent claims of an equally early warm and wet Earth I'd be unsurprised to discover that life on Earth and Mars share a common ancestry (or are at least distant cousins, survivors of crustal reformatting by giant impacts and natural interplanetary flight).

If and when we ever see a substantial industrial base on the Moon, then that's the place to look for meteorites bearing the early signs of life - or maybe even smaller bodies, like asteroids, Phobos and Deimos, comets...