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.)

[Decepticon]

They are sending a Probe to Jupiter and according to this article Europa Ganymede and Callisto will not be studied?!?!


EUROPA should be Number 1 on the priority list.


I'm so upset by this article. http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_juno_050609.html

[JRehling]

They are sending a Probe to Jupiter and according to this article Europa Ganymede and Callisto will not be studied?!?!
EUROPA should be Number 1 on the priority list.
I'm so upset by this article. http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_juno_050609.html

For some reason, I can't load that article. I get a blank screen.

But, the reason why Europa has been shortchanged is organizational fumbling of a high degree. I can remember when Pluto and Europa were competing for a launch date that would have already taken place, and the winner of the competition was... neither.
Europa Screw-up #1 was to bundle three bizarrely dissimilar missions under a single planning structure (a Europa orbiter, a Pluto flyby, and a solar probe), even though the three had little in common except they were spacecraft that would not land anywhere.
Europa Screw-up #2 was to propose JIMO, aka Mission Impossible, so that we had to wait until it fell back to the ground when the gravity of common sense had counteracted the upward momentum of bad politics. JIMO was meant to be the sugarcoating on an expensive nuclear propulsion research program, which was motivated by a way to drain NASA funding for a quasi-military project. JIMO's math never worked, and it was the brainchild of people who don't care if the math works before they sic some government agencies on a job.
As far as Europa was concerned, the JIMO proposal was an X year delay, with X being mercifully hastened by O'Keefe's departure.

As it turns out, a few years ago was probably too early to have commited to a Europa mission design. It's taken a while for Galileo results to be digested, and even now, I think a Europa exploration architecture has to be considered very carefully. We're playing 20 questions with Europa, where each question costs a billion dollars or so. The best next mission to Europa might not be the best mission if we were only sending a total of one. We've got to consider what the next mission would be depending upon the first one, and then plan to make absolutely sure that no mission asks a yes/no question where the answer is, "Neither yes nor no. That's the wrong question."

It's clear that Juno is a good Jupiter mission and it can go ahead and take place. Waiting for the Europa situation to clarify before sending a mission to Jupiter is like waiting to figure out next year's taxes before eating breakfast. The two things are unrelated. Europa shouldn't preempt a good Jupiter mission any more than Europa should preempt a good Mercury mission.

[tedstryk]

Another factor to consider is that a decent Europa Orbiter mission probably can't be done as a New Frontiers mission. Juno will allow some fundamental Jovian science to be accomplished. And it is one of the most productive missions that can be accomplished at Jupiter on such a budget.