Is Europa really the "highest priority" of the community?, Cleave said it was at LPSC? |
Is Europa really the "highest priority" of the community?, Cleave said it was at LPSC? |
Mar 15 2006, 05:50 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2547 Joined: 13-September 05 Member No.: 497 |
From Emily's LPSC blog: "Bob Pappalardo would not sit down until he got Cleave to acknowledge that Europa is the consensus highest priority of the planetary science community."
Cleave was obviously poorly prepared for this session, but I don't see that this acknowledgement is either meaningful or particularly accurate. If Europa were the "highest priority" of the PS community as a whole, then one might wonder why we were spending all this money on Mars. I could easily imagine that Europa is the highest priority of the outer planets community, but frankly I was surprised when Europa Orbiter appeared in the '07 budget (presumably the result of some serious lobbying on someone's part.) It was pretty obvious to me then that there would be no money for it, especially in the aftermath of JPL running the old EO project into the ground with cost overruns and engineering upscopes. (And JIMO is best forgotten.) Don't get me wrong, I would love to be involved with a Europa mission (we did what I think was a good proposal design for EO) but I don't see either the money or the political support being there in the near term. I know it's frustrating, but one has to be realistic, and it might help to avoid the aura of entitlement that I perceive is building in some parts of the community (not referring to you, Bob). Of course, I am just a lowly engineer. -------------------- Disclaimer: This post is based on public information only. Any opinions are my own.
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Mar 20 2006, 01:42 AM
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Guests |
There are other problems with running small missions to the outer System. First, the outer System is just unavoidably bloody hard and expensive to explore -- only one Discovery finalist has ever been aimed at an outer world, and it isn't that easy to properly explore them even with New Frontiers-class missions.
Second, the things we have been trying to observe -- unlike those in the inner System -- usually comprise miniature solar systems in their own right, and they include a hell of a lot of different types of physical phenomena that are going on simultaneously and interacting with each other, so that you need simultaneous observations of them with a large number of different instruments to properly understand them. It's not impossible to break them up -- Galileo and Cassini, for instance, could theoretically have been broken up into three missions each, consisting of an entry probe, a spin-stabilized magnetospheric orbiter, and a fully stabilized remote-sensing orbiter -- but the total cost of all this is a lot higher than for a single unified craft, and again you're going to miss some important simultaneous overlapping observations from instruments on the three separate missions. Third, the gap between missions to an outer world is so damn unavoidably long. If you find something interesting from an initial simple and low-cost outer-world spacecraft that is worthy of investigation with another type of instruments, then, no matter how much funding you've got, you have to twiddle your thumbs for YEARS, or decades, before that additional set of instruments can get there -- which provides another strong motive to carry as many different kinds of instruments as you can on the very first mission. |
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