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 17 2005, 12:21 AM
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QUOTE (Analyst @ Jun 16 2005, 12:34 PM) Bruce, I want your optimism when it comes to future space missions. Your are talking about proposed missions in the 2015 to 2030 timeframe as if it's just waiting and there they are. They will not, at least not all. Roadmaps get changed, very quickly, new ones emerge and disappear. Look at the Voyager odyssey in the late 1960ies and early 1970ies (TOPS, Grand Tour and so on), look at Galileo and Cassini (Cassini could have done several asteroid flybys, but they saved some dollars in cruise mode). I'm talking only about the cornerstone missions what left the pad. Or see Alan's fight for a (small) Pluto mission. Analyst, pessimist, realist? You're right -- but the plans for a Europa orbiter seem, at long long last, to be firm. Mike Griffin was absolutely explicit on the subject in his Congressional testimony; the Decadal Survey and the new Solar System Roadmap have both unambiguously declared it to be the most important non-Mars Solar System mission for the future (as the Decadal Survey did for the Pluto probe just before Congress finally ordered Bush and O'Keefe, over their dead bodies, to fly it); and see the new word from NASA to the Outer Planets Assessment Group at its meeting last week: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/jun_05_meetin...jun05report.pdf Apparently Griffin will recommend it for a start in 2007 and flight around 2014 -- just as the S.S. Roadmap recommends. As for those other missions: the report also says, on the negative side, that the third New Frontiers mission's AO and launch will be delayed until 5 years after Juno, instead of 3 as had been planned --although they hope to speed the schedule back up again after that. You're certainly right in saying that the current schedule in the S.S. Roadmap is over-optimistic -- such plans always are. But after the remaining three top-priority NF missions are also flown (the Moon, Venus, a comet), the Io Obsever was ranked high among the second-priority NF missions by the Decadal Survey -- apparently about first or second-place among them. So, notwithstannding NASA's inevitable delays, there is still a real chance that the Io mission will get flown some time before the end of the 2020s. |
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