Is Europa really the "highest priority" of the community?, Cleave said it was at LPSC? Options

[mcaplinger]

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.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

This thing is apparently also quite a wide-angle camera, which means that -- even if it could send back photos live during a crash into Io -- the last ones it sent back would almost certainly be no better than Galileo's sharpest ones, and probably a good deal worse. (But the spectral resolution of the accompanying near-IR point spectrometer is twice as good as NIMS, over the 2 to 5 micron range, improving its mineralogical powers. And any near-IR thermal photos taken by the accompanying near-IR camera would surely be sharper than any thermal maps of Io made by either the NIMS or the PPR on Galileo.)

In any case, since it seems likely that it will be a long time before we get any kind of closeup look at Io again (Europa Orbiter wouldn't come near it, although it's now a long-shot possibility that the next New Frontiers mission selected may be a Jupiter-orbiting Io mapper), it seems worthwhile looking into any possibility.

[JRehling]

In any case, since it seems likely that it will be a long time before we get any kind of closeup look at Io again (Europa Orbiter wouldn't come near it, although it's now a long-shot possibility that the next New Frontiers mission selected may be a Jupiter-orbiting Io mapper), it seems worthwhile looking into any possibility.

I know the published "sample" trajectories for Europa Orbiter didn't feature a close Io flyby, but would it be possible to perform one before JOI on initial arrival? Well, obviously it's possible, but would it cost too much delta-v? I imagine it would involve flying past Io and then on to about Europa orbital radius before firing the engines. That would also start the clock ticking on the radiation survival lifetime, and briefly taking on more rads than the nominal mission, but only for hours. And the flyby would not have to be very close, either; it may be sufficient to "split the difference" between Io and Europa orbital distance to accomplish the main scientific goals.