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_*]

The presentations from the June OPAG meeting are now online:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/jun_05_meeting/agenda.html

Perhaps the most interesting are the two on the new design of the Europa
Orbiter. This work is now very advanced and detailed, and the science
payload has been greatly enlarged from the earlier design -- although it
still seems questionable that a small lander could be added. (They may also
be aiming for a launch as early as 2012.)

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/jun_05_meetin...E_Mission_Study.
pdf
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/jun_05_meetin..._Science_Instru
ments_Trace_OPAG.pdf

However, most of the others are also of note. Note in particular the piece
about work on two possible Titan mission designs -- one of which consists
not of an aerobot, but of a small surface rover with inflatable wheels,
which might be able to drive 500 km in 3 years. (The other, oddly enough,
is simply a Titan orbiter -- no aerobot mission design is presented here,
although it's very unlikely that the concept has been rejected.)

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/jun_05_meetin...s/opagtitan.pdf

[imran]

Thanks for the links, Bruce. I am surprised too that they are not considering an aerobot ("blimp") mission for Titan. The orbiter mission concept sounds like Cassini Huygens mission part two, with global coverage and a little more capability. The rover mission would also not do justice to a dynamic place like Titan.