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_*]

While I'm on the subject of Europa Orbiter and the Jovian radiation belts: one important factor in NASA's advisors saying that it's time to go ahead with the thing is that -- thanks to the additional shielding mass made possible by using inner-planet gravity assists to reach Jupiter -- it has now been decided that our existing technology is already adequate to provide it with the radiation-hard electronics it will need. This is also partly because a lot of additional work has been done in the last few years to develop rad-hard electronics, during the work on EO's previous lighter-weight incarnation and then on JIMO. The computer on Deep Impact and MRO can confidently withstand 1 Mrad, and a lot of other similarly hard new electronics have also been developed.

Using the VEEGA trajectory, by the way, TRIPLES the mass of EO compared to the direct-to-Jupiter trajectory which they (for reasons that baffle me) originally had planned for it.

[mcaplinger]

This is also partly because a lot of additional work has been done in the last few years to develop rad-hard electronics, during the work on EO's previous lighter-weight incarnation and then on JIMO. The computer on Deep Impact and MRO can confidently withstand 1 Mrad, and a lot of other similarly hard new electronics have also been developed.

Don't believe all the JPL hype. The RAD750 is only hard to ">100 Krad" and if they'd meant 1 Mrad, they'd have said that. And it's not all that obvious how you can build an Mrad-hard imager, though we'll do it if you toss a few million our way

[JRehling]

And it's not all that obvious how you can build an Mrad-hard imager

Vacuum tubes?