NASA Europa Missions, projects and proposals for the 2020s |
NASA Europa Missions, projects and proposals for the 2020s |
Mar 5 2014, 12:53 AM
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Forum Contributor Group: Members Posts: 1374 Joined: 8-February 04 From: North East Florida, USA. Member No.: 11 |
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Mar 11 2014, 10:56 AM
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Junior Member Group: Members Posts: 26 Joined: 13-August 05 Member No.: 464 |
I appreciate that Europa missions are amongst the most thoroughly studied in the catalogue of future unmanned spaceflight, but I was wondering whether there was any discussion of the trade space for the primary mirror versus shielding mass, mass, potential orbits, pointing issues, radiation and similar. I suspect this is probably because the answers are so clear as to be self-evident, and my apologies in advance.
LORRI-class optics seemed to provide encouraging results at a reasonable stand-off range in 2007. Are there any possibilities opened up by HiRISE or supra-HiRISE (e.g. 1m, or 1.2m mirror)? More distant fly-bys for equivalent resolution to the NAC/Topographic imager, or some kind of elliptical orbit which produced very close fly-bys (Recon Imager equivalent) and then kept the spacecraft out of the most hostile area for most of the time, and perhaps forestalled the need to dispose of the spacecraft while it was still functional for planetary protection purposes. Perhaps the challenge of motion compensation with no scan platform might make it infeasible even if the mass trade was not completely ridiculous. It probably means no prospect for a radar instrument, and perhaps the scaling of the mirror is such that it is a catastrophically poor choice compared to shielding mass. I struggle to see how NF-class mission would work, though the older IVO proposals for Discovery (admittedly with the power supplied via GFE) seemed to suggest it was not utterly implausible. Anyway, apologies again if these are distracting from more salient questions on the prospective Europa mission. Edit: Search function already had some leads on the various issues with this, and OPAG discussion c. 2004 - 2006 of special optics from Ganymede - it still seemed to hold some promise at that point. Presumably the trades have not changed appreciably since then, except perhaps the new explicit science goal for plume imagery/spectra. Roly |
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