Neptune Orbiter, Another proposed mission Options

[Rob Pinnegar]

This seems like a good place to start off the Uranus and Neptune forum: with the next ice-giants mission.

I will admit to not knowing a whole lot about the Neptune Orbiter With Probes (NOWP), other than the fact that it's in the planning stages, and a few other details I've gathered from Wikipedia and various other Internet sources. Anyone care to get this one going with a bit more information?

[nprev]

Good points, Doug.

It's sure easy to forget the downlink bitrate in particular when talking about these deep outer system missions. Lasercomm really needs to be developed for future Flagship-class forays beyond Saturn. Cassini may well be the last one of these that relies on RF...

[Stephen]

It's sure easy to forget the downlink bitrate in particular when talking about these deep outer system missions. Lasercomm really needs to be developed for future Flagship-class forays beyond Saturn. Cassini may well be the last one of these that relies on RF...

Hmm. Is Cassini a "beyond Saturn" foray or an "at Saturn" foray? If the latter, then as yet there have been no Flagship-class missions beyond Saturn (unless you count Voyager).

But I digress...

Wasn't there going to be a trial a laser communications system on the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter that was due to be flown in 2009?

Now MTO has been cancelled there will probably not be a test flown until at least the mid-2010s (hopefully on the putative MSO-MTO mission). But that in turn means that Flagship-class missions are unlikely to be able to start using it until at least the later 2010s.

Which in turn suggests that any Flagship-class missions to or beyond Saturn which go into the pipeline between now and then will be unlikely to be using laser communications, at least as its primary communications systems.

I guess that's just one more reason why a Titan mission is unlikely to be jumping the queue in front of a mission to Europa.

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Stephen

[JRehling]

I guess that's just one more reason why a Titan mission is unlikely to be jumping the queue in front of a mission to Europa.

There's one outstanding reason which is that the data from Cassini hasn't been digested yet. As a rough sketch of the exploration process, I'd say that it tends to take a few years to understand the data from the previous mission before you can solidly know which investigations to undertake with the next one. (At least, when a world's exploration is in the early stages. We're farther along with, eg, Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter.) If Cassini were to last til 2010, it would be fair to estimate that it won't be any sooner than 2015 before you could count on the community having pretty well modeled Titan from that data. A 2020 launch would be sort of a rush job.

I think Europa is ready for planning the mission (the better part of a decade after the most productive Galileo flybys), and Titan isn't even in the same point in the queue for the two of them to be "competing". I think it's a dead issue. Even if Titan were intrinsically more desirable to visit next, Europa's time in the spotlight can come and go before the next Titan mission should be launched, unless we don't care about whether or not it's well-designed...