Discovery Program 2006 and Missions Of Opportunity |
Discovery Program 2006 and Missions Of Opportunity |
Guest_AlexBlackwell_* |
Jan 3 2006, 10:19 PM
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#1
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Guests |
I'm not sure exactly which forum this fits in but NASA has just released the AO for Discovery Program 2006 and Missions of Opportunity. See the Discovery Program Acquisition Home Page for more details. Click on the "Discovery AO" link to download the PDF.
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Jan 26 2006, 11:44 PM
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#2
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Guests |
As for Ted Stryk's suggestions: Venus entry probes are indeed plausible as Discovery missions, and in fact have been proposed from the very start of the program. So have Venus balloons: consider Ron Greeley's VEVA, which involved not just a balloon but one that would drop four little camera-equipped impactors as it blew over different parts of the planet.
But I imagine a Mercury hard lander, which would require a really major propulsion system, would probably be sufficiently costly that it would have to fall into the New Frontiers category (where it is one of the ideas being given serious consideration). The same seems to be true of even a single Jovian entry probe (where presumably the goal would be to penetrate a lot deeper than the Galileo probe did, as well as coming down in a more representative part of the planet's atmosphere). However, one recent paradigm shift seems to be toward the idea that you don't really need deep entry probes to provide good compositional information on the other three giant planets -- and so the idea is now being strongly pushed that the next giant-planet entry probe mission should be a New Frontiers-class Saturn flyby that would just drop off two or three vented Galileo-type entry probes (or maybe even just one), with the flyby craft also observing the greater depths of Saturn's atmosphere with a Juno-type microwave spectrometer. This of course could also be done for Uranus or Neptune if we decided to do so before flying the much more complex Neptune Orbiter mission, although in that case you'd want to add a considerable number of other instruments to the flyby craft to make additional observations of the planet and its moons. A Saturn Multiprobe Flyby, moreover, might be able to use solar power rather than an RTG -- just such a suggestion was made years ago, using a modified "INSIDE Jupiter" craft as the Saturn probe carrier, with no orbital insertion motor but a second pair of big solar arrays added. |
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Jan 27 2006, 01:37 AM
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#3
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
Other options would include smash-and-grab sample returns for airless bodies, with Mercury and Europa being the primary candidates of interest. Incidentally, an idea I don't recall seeing elsewhere would be a Stardust type mission with Saturn's *rings* as the object. (Jupiter's rings also an option.) Sampling the plumes of Io or Enceladus would also be possible, although if primitive species dominate, that would be a waste of money vs. a GCMS fly-through (which has been done, in both cases).
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