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_*]

Actually, there are a hell of a lot of things they very badly want to get more closeup looks at Io for -- and they're listed both in Spencer's white paper ( http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/io.pdf ) and in William Smythe's previous essay "Getting Back to Io", which can be found at members.fortunecity.com/volcanopele/gbtio-1.doc .

On rereading both these essays, by the way, I've come to realize that I have very seriously underestimated the potential range of flexibility of orbital design for an Io Observer. Indeed, Spencer's paper actually points out that, if the Observer had the same radiation hardness as Europa Orbiter, it could make 100 Io flybys from an EQUATORIAL orbit, despite the fact that this would maximize its radiation dose on each flyby. So, simply by utilizing the radiation-hardened technology -- and, indeed, the spacecraft design -- of Europa Orbiter (and with much less fuel), we could devise a perfectly good combined Io/Ganymede/Callisto multiple flyby mission -- that is, our yearned-after "Galileo 2". (Indeed, with radiation hardness like that, we could use it to take a few close looks at Amalthea as well.)