Neptune Orbiter, Another proposed mission Options

[Rob Pinnegar]

This seems like a good place to start off the Uranus and Neptune forum: with the next ice-giants mission.

I will admit to not knowing a whole lot about the Neptune Orbiter With Probes (NOWP), other than the fact that it's in the planning stages, and a few other details I've gathered from Wikipedia and various other Internet sources. Anyone care to get this one going with a bit more information?

[edstrick]

In a conversation some 10? years ago, maybe at the MagicCon World SF convention in Orlando, I chatted with Gentry Lee and asked him something about the reverse motors on the Galileo antenna, having heard some references to that. *AS I RECALL*, he indicated they had needed that command capability for something else, maybe sun-shade deployment for revised mission that took Galileo inward to Venus where it wasn't designed to survive. He also stated that simple reversing the motor direction would not have backed the pins out of the position in which they'd jammed and would have in fact made the problem worse. I don't understand the design well enough to see how that would happen, but I can imagine design conditions where it would. Everything I'm told is that the failure was more complicated and less intuitively preventible (or fixable -- "if only") than everybody wants to imagine.

The Galileo antenna deploy failure was simply one of those "damn things" that should never force you to not use a proven design or concept because of one terrible example.