Nasa Picks "juno" As Next New Frontiers Mission |
Nasa Picks "juno" As Next New Frontiers Mission |
Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Jun 1 2005, 10:10 PM
Post
#1
|
Guests |
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_* |
Jun 22 2005, 10:52 PM
Post
#2
|
Guests |
Well, keep in mind that Cassini's 45 close flybys of Titan over 4 years -- using only Titan itself to reset the shape of each orbit -- cover a really impressive variety of spots on its surface at closest approach. I see no reason why you couldn't do the same thing for a comparable number of Io flybys, especially since you would have four moons, rather than one, to modify the craft's orbit between flybys. (William Smythe's "Getting back to Io" paper does say that it's a lot easier to vary the longitudes of close approaches to Io than their latitudes; but Cassini does quite a lot of both during its Titan flybys.)
As John Rehling says, this mission (along with Europa Orbiter) would also make so many close flybys of Ganymede and Callisto that a mission devoted specifically to those two moons would very likely be superfluous (as, I think, a Jupiter Flyby with Muitple Entry Probes is also likely to be for quite a while, given the combination of the Galileo entry probe and Juno). |
|
|
Lo-Fi Version | Time is now: 31st October 2024 - 11:37 PM |
RULES AND GUIDELINES Please read the Forum Rules and Guidelines before posting. IMAGE COPYRIGHT |
OPINIONS AND MODERATION Opinions expressed on UnmannedSpaceflight.com are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of UnmannedSpaceflight.com or The Planetary Society. The all-volunteer UnmannedSpaceflight.com moderation team is wholly independent of The Planetary Society. The Planetary Society has no influence over decisions made by the UnmannedSpaceflight.com moderators. |
SUPPORT THE FORUM Unmannedspaceflight.com is funded by the Planetary Society. Please consider supporting our work and many other projects by donating to the Society or becoming a member. |