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, we DO need more surface observation points on Venus. One of the highest-priority goals of landings (specified in the new Roadmap) is to look for patches of granite or andesite crust which would indicate the existence of oceans on ancient Venus -- and the best place by far to look for those is in the "tessera" patches, which have been the top-priority landing sites for any American Venus mission for years. We would also like to take a look at those puzzling areas of high radar reflectivity on Venus' high-altitude terrain -- and, on top of that, keep in mind that even the Soviet landers didn't do any mineralogy at all of their own basaltic landing sites.

The question is whether the best way to do this is by a surface rover, an aerobot, or a larger number of multiple stationary landers. Frankly, I'm inclined to go with the latter -- we have the technology for those RIGHT NOW. (We might also be advised to try to develop in-situ age-dating instruments for Venus' surface; we have already done some promising initial work on those, and God knows it would be easier than a Venus sample return -- which I expect to see Congress fund on the same day O.J. finds the real killers.)

[tedstryk]

Actually, we DO need more surface observation points on Venus.  One of the highest-priority goals of landings (specified in the new Roadmap) is to look for patches of granite or andesite crust which would indicate the existence of oceans on ancient Venus -- and the best place by far to look for those is in the "tessera" patches, which have been the top-priority landing sites for any American Venus mission for years.  We would also like to take a look at those puzzling areas of high radar reflectivity on Venus' high-altitude terrain -- and, on top of that, keep in mind that even the Soviet landers didn't do any mineralogy at all of their own basaltic landing sites. 

The question is whether the best way to do this is by a surface rover, an aerobot, or a larger number of multiple stationary landers.  Frankly, I'm inclined to go with the latter -- we have the technology for those RIGHT NOW.  (We might also be advised to try to develop in-situ age-dating instruments for Venus' surface; we have already done some promising initial work on those, and God knows it would be easier than a Venus sample return -- which I expect to see Congress fund on the same day O.J. finds the real killers.)

It should also be noted that the Venera landings were far from random. Most cluster around the same region.