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_*]

Damned if I know, especially with this president -- who may hold out stubbornly for continuing to have the manned program drain off money from NASA's science program like Dracula. The one upcoming change I'm virtually certain of is that Europa Orbiter will be funded in 2007. But, looking at the current science budget and the retinkerings with it that Griffin has done just in the last month, I would be inclined to suspect some money will indeed be drained out of the Mars program -- and also that the Webb Telescope will be substantially delayed both to make sure that when it does fly it will still be big enough to do a proper science job, and to make sure that there will be enough money for the Hubble repair-or-reflight and to reduce the rapidly growing new delays in the two big extrasolar-planets missions (SIM and TPF-C).

(Once again, all these problems could be radically reduced if Griffin decided to go for a Hubble unmanned reflight rather than a Shuttle repair mission -- since such a reflight could be delayed as long as necessary, and would probably cost a little less into the bargain -- but, ah, that would once again expose the manned space program as a literally total fraud, and we can't have that. Too many incumbent politicians' and bureaucrats' reputations hinge on not admitting that they made a huge mistake, which is also why the Iraq War will drag on for a couple more years before we admit that we've lost it. But I digress.)