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?

[tasp]

Just in case NASA/JPL finds themselves looking for a 'flagship' type mission idea (I hold no illusions regarding the probability of that), how about this:

Send a probe to Neptune that can aerobrake in Neptunes' atmosphere to acheive Neptune orbit. During the decel phase, have some instruments do some direct sampling and analysis of the Neptune atmosphere.

After achieving Neptune orbit, use Triton's gravity to modify the probe orbit to allow close examination of everything in the Neptune system deemed interesting.

Towards the end of the mission, use aerobraking in Triton's atmosphere to decel into Triton orbit (probably can't use the same heat shield for both Neptune and Triton, but some effort would be expended to make sure of that, handy if you can). Examine Triton from orbit, use more aerobraking to circularize the orbit (or, if possible, use a steerable ballute for orbital plane changes) to examine interesting landing locals on Triton.

Then, again using the ballute or aerocapture shell for re-entry, land on the best spot found on Triton. Hopefully with almost dry fuel tanks at touch down.



I'm thinking the advantages of this will be a great savings in fuel needed for a very demanding mission, utilization of various instruments in all phases of the mission, difficulty in approving 3 missions to Neptune can be avoided by having 1 mission do all 3, probe will potentially have a long life on the surface of Triton from the nuclear batteries needed for the probe.

Difficulties would be great complexity of the probe, cost and technical risk.