Uranus Orbiter, The other proposed ice-giant mission Options

[Rob Pinnegar]

Since the Neptune Orbiter thread has started to veer into talking about a Uranus orbiter as well, it seemed like a good idea to start a topic for Uranus.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

You don't need to grasp at straws -- Tasp's fears about the unusability of aerocapture due to uncertainties about the planet's atmospheric structure are, according to Jeffrey Hall of JPL, very seriously overstated. Hall's team has run almost 2000 simulated aerocapture entries into the atmospheres of both Titan and (more difficult) Neptune, inserting random changes in atmospheric structure to see if the written autopilot programs can cope with them -- without a single failure. (I can give you the URL for this actual report, once I track it down again in my records.)

He said flatly at COMPLEX that -- once a single New Millennium mission (maybe ST-9 in 2010) is flown to confirm the overall validity of the aerocapture autopilot programs -- the technology will be ready for use immediately at the smaller worlds (for instance, MEPAG was wrong in saying that an engineering test of aerocapture will be necessary at Mars) And he also went so far as to say that -- while aerocapture at the giant planets requires a radically different kind of boat-shaped heat shield, to provide the higher lift/drag ratio that will allow the autopilot to make corrective maneuvers faster, we won't even need another flight test for those aerocaptures; just some more ground work. Indeed, his cheerleading for this technology was one of the major pieces of news at the COMPLEX meeting, and seemed to effectively change the minds of the assembled members.