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.)

[edstrick]

Part of the problem is that *any* Europa orbiter mission is ***HARD***.
It takes a tremendous amount of Delta-V (velocity change) and only some of that can be done by gravity assist flyby's of the moons. Add to that the radiation environment that was crippling and killing Galileo as the extended missions proceeded, but on a continuous basis as you get in toward Europa, rather for only the periapsis pass part of month long orbits. You need extra radiation hardened electronics, AND massive shielding. The original Europa orbiter mission was nuked as it's projected costs passed some 1.2 billion, heading for and past 1.5 billion <or so>, when it was supposed to be an under 1 billion $ mission.

Good management and realistic objectives will help tremendously, but they won't solve the basic problem. It's a damn hard mission.

[Decepticon]

Even with Galileo type flybys would make me happy. From the sounds of the space.com article Juno will not get that far out?!