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_*]

Well, that's what they kept assuring all of us (repeatedly) at the Europa meeting. It's not my fault if we were being fibbed to...

[mcaplinger]

It's not my fault if we were being fibbed to...

It's arguably your fault if you state it as absolute truth without going to any effort to verify it, though.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

It's arguably your fault if you state it as absolute truth without going to any effort to verify it, though.

Hokay. Call me naive, but -- even given the number of times central NASA HQ has routinely lied to us -- the thought that JPL's (multiple) spokesmen might be deliberately lying through their teeth, not only to me but to all the scientists at that meeting, never occurred to me. (It never occurred to the scientists there, either. If Mike Caplinger can confirm that tidbit, they won't be very amused to learn about it.)

[mcaplinger]

the thought that JPL's (multiple) spokesmen might be deliberately lying through their teeth...

Of course they weren't lying through their teeth, Bruce, the world is not so black and white as you seem to think. But they were, I suspect, being overly optimistic about what the technology development groups were telling them. The same thing happened in the last EO project: the AO claimed that there was all this wonderful "X2000" radhard technology available, and as the proposal process went on, all of it proved to be vaporware. After that experience, I'd need more than a JPL scientist's claim that it was really ready for flight. As just one example, what non-volatile memory technology are they claiming is megarad-hard? Current flash memory cannot survive more than a few tens of Krads, and MRAM is neither dense enough or flight-proven that I know of.