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Jupiter flagship selected
volcanopele
post Feb 19 2009, 12:46 AM
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Since the probe that will be flying by Io has been approved, can I have champagne and dancing girls anyway?


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tedstryk
post Feb 19 2009, 02:07 AM
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It sure seems to me that ESA has made up its mind.

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMPHGWX3RF_index_0.html


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EccentricAnomaly
post Feb 19 2009, 03:54 PM
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QUOTE (Stephen @ Feb 18 2009, 04:36 PM) *
As Jason Perry's page points out , though, and others here have alluded to, though "JEO is safe", "despite this downselection, the contest isn't over for JGO" back at the ESA. So let's not bring out the champagne and dancing girls just yet. Save those for when JGO gets the final go-ahead.


Although we should be very happy about returning to Jupiter, we shouldn't be complacent on JEO. With a 2020 launch a lot can happen. I think we all need to get strongly and vocally behind JEO, or else we may loose yet another outer planet mission.

We had an outer planet flagship launch in the 70s, 80, and 90s... and none in the 00s, and we'll have none in the 10s. Now they're making us wait until the 20s for one. I don't think we'd be out of line to demand that they send two in the 20s. Especially given the extremely high degree of commonality in the designs.... heck, most of engineering team was shared between both studies.... why can't engineering teams be shared in phase A/B too?

EJSM and TSSM both return a huge science bang for the buck... I doubt NASA has many other options for such a large return on investment. Especially if looking for life is a focus, nothing else is even in the same league. These two missions should be a top priority for NASA.

Let's do a MER to the outer solar system! Spirit and Opportunity on performance enhancing drugs. :-)
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gpurcell
post Feb 19 2009, 05:49 PM
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How did it happen that there was such a gap between Cassini and this mission? Was this is a result of the Battlestar Galactica JIMO fiasco?
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vjkane
post Feb 19 2009, 06:23 PM
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QUOTE (EccentricAnomaly @ Feb 19 2009, 03:54 PM) *
We had an outer planet flagship launch in the 70s, 80, and 90s... and none in the 00s, and we'll have none in the 10s. Now they're making us wait until the 20s for one. I don't think we'd be out of line to demand that they send two in the 20s. Especially given the extremely high degree of commonality in the designs.... heck, most of engineering team was shared between both studies.... why can't engineering teams be shared in phase A/B too?

Assuming that the current levels of funding (adjusted for inflation which hasn't happened in recent years) continues, there is probably money for one flagship mission in the 2020s. In the 1990s, we had Cassini, in the 2000s, we have the development of MSL, in the 2010s JEO. A Titan Flagship return would be in competition with a Mars Flagship mission (either another big rover or deep drill or sample return) and a Venus Flagship mission (which will be proposed in the next month for the 2020s).

I think that if you really want a Titan return to fly in the 2020s, the best bet is to figure out how to do one for a bit over $1B. The billion dollar box studies said it couldn't be done for less than $1.5B-2B. If that is true, then there is a harsh competition between excellent Flagship missions for the 2020s. If someone could figure out how to return to Titan for half the price of a Flagship, I see some hope.


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gpurcell
post Feb 19 2009, 08:04 PM
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Was MSL explicitly funded instead of an outer planets mission or did it just kinda work out that way in the end?
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Mariner9
post Feb 19 2009, 09:02 PM
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Caveat: I'm trying to avoid a political discussion. Just answering his question with history as I remember it.

I don't think the term 'flagship' came into common use until around the time of the Decadal Survey in 2003. The survey concentrated mostly on non-Mars missions, so if I recall correctly in the Survey the term was used mostly to refer to the large outer planets missions like Galileo and Cassini. I never recall MSL reffered to as a flagship until around 2007-2008 when Michael Griffin called it one.

The reccomendation was that in every decade NASA try to fly one flagship, a New Frontiers mission every 3 years, and a Discovery mission every 18 months. (notice the nice multiples of 3 here..... 1 Flagship, 3 New Frontiers, 6 Discovery) .

The survey also recommended that if the missions could not be flown that often, that the ratio remain somewhat the same. In other words, do not attempt to fly 3 New Frontiers and 6 Discoveries in a decade, and then just keep putting off the Flagship. I read this as a deliberate attempt to get away from nearly a decade of all new mission starts essentially being Discovery class.

More or less NASA seems to be attempting to follow this recommendation. Over the last few years the rate of New Frontiers Announcements of Opportunity comes along every 5-6 years, Discovery every 3 years or so. Six years after the Decadal Survey we now have (hopefully) a commitment to an outer planets flagship.

Cassini - 1997, MSL - 2009 (goal), and EJSM - 2020, roughly speaking we are getting a flagship every decade or so.

Again, this is just the events as I recall them. Not trying to start a funding debate.
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rlorenz
post Feb 19 2009, 09:29 PM
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QUOTE (Greg Hullender @ Feb 18 2009, 02:54 PM) *
Ralph, I figure the JS assist opportunities out to recur every 20 years, because 1/(1/12 - 1/29.5) = 20.2. That doesn't say how long the launch window stays open, though, but is it as much as three years?

--Greg


You're right. I guess how wide the flyby window (depending on the number of revs and Venus/Earth
encounters, launch could be any time) depends on the flight speed range, but I bet it is close to 3 years
(e.g. Cassini had windows in 1995, 1996 and 1997).

So 2031/2032 might be the earliest useful timeframe, but someone actually needs to figure out a real
trajectory. On the other hand, in that rosy future, maybe we wont need flybys because we'll have
better propulsion, aerocapture etc.... (and Titan Explorer 2007 and TSSM managed without flybys anyway)
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NMRguy
post Feb 19 2009, 09:35 PM
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Something that I can't figure out is how large the solar panels would be for the ESA JGO. JGO is much heavier on the imaging and spectroscopy than say Juno, and no one has tried to perform a "flagship" class mission this far from the Sun. (Sure there is Rosetta, but its primary mission sweeps back toward the Sun after the comet rendez-vous.) Can ESA pull off a large solar powered mission so far from the sun without having prohibitively large (and heavy) solar panels?
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vjkane
post Feb 19 2009, 11:46 PM
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QUOTE (gpurcell @ Feb 19 2009, 08:04 PM) *
Was MSL explicitly funded instead of an outer planets mission or did it just kinda work out that way in the end?

The last Decadal Survey (2003) called for two missions in the >$2-3B range, a Mars Sample Return and a Europa orbiter. The straight forward proposal for an Europa orbiter was changed to a very ambitious (some have used less charitable terms that aren't suitable for a family board like this one) proposal for a nuclear reactor powered multi-moon Jovian orbiter called JIMO (http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Jupiter-Icy-Moons-Orbiter) by the then NASA administrator. After JIMO's cancellation with a new NASA administrator, there was no funding to restart a straightforward Europa orbiter.

The Mars Sample Return was effectively replaced with the Mars Science Laboratory as the big Mars mission.

There is no formal rule that I know of that there will be just one of these big missions per decade (the Decadal Survey called for two in this past decade), but that is how the funding has actually worked out since NASA restarted its planetary program in the mid-1980s. (There was a time when the only NASA planetary mission flying was Voyager with the repeatedly delayed Galileo mission as the only one in development. Those were the bad years.)


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tedstryk
post Feb 19 2009, 11:51 PM
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I think the term was coined during the early Goldin era unless it predates it. I remember him referring to Cassini as such.


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Mariner9
post Feb 20 2009, 12:18 AM
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You mean when Goldin wasn't calling Cassini "Battlestar Galactica" ?

As I recall he hated that mission, thought it was much too large and unwieldy.
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Stu
post Feb 20 2009, 12:28 AM
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At the risk of offending Titan-lovers here, I have to be honest and say that I'm glad Jupiter got the nod for this flagship mission, Don’t get me wrong; I love the Saturn system, and I love Titan too. What’s not to love about a planet-sized satellite that has its own atmosphere, coastlines, lakes and maybe ice volcanoes, too? And the proposed Titan mission sounds thrilling - who wouldn’t be thrilled to the point of blacking-out by the prospect of seeing pictures from a probe that has just splash-landed in one of Titan’s methane lakes, or from a balloon that is drifting over Titan’s plains - but that sounds like a very, very tough challenge to me. It will happen one day, I’m sure, but maybe not for another three decades… and I can’t wait that long! Jeez, I'm going to be 61 - sixty frakking one! - when the new Europa images start coming back. That's quite a depressing thought.

But I'm still excited at the prospect of seeing Europa again. It's one of my favourite worlds in the solar system. It’s captivated and fascinated me ever since I saw those first fuzzy Voyager images of it back in the days of Charlie’s Angels. (Oops, showing my age now!) and, spookily, I just finished reading John Varley's "Rolling Thunder" novel, a huge chunk of which is set on Europa. Reading it reminded me why I love its icebergs and ice cliffs; grooves and channels; crevices and crevasses. Voyager and Galileo showed us features on its mottled, fractured, colour-spattered surface that still make me shake my head in wonder. And those images, which are pretty good, were taken with old technology, cameras nowhere near as good as the kit we have today! Just imagine the stunning images we’ll see when EJSM starts taking pictures… we’ll zoom in on those jagged edged icebergs… see right into the fractures and pits and grooves… catch sunlight glinting off the vast ice plains… see Jupiter looming over Europa’s horizon, just as it’s been shown in space art for all these years…

Of course, these pictures are all a long, long way ahead, and I can't help wondering what kind of world we’ll all be living in then. As I said, I’ll be 61 in 2026... how badly will Earth and mankind have been affected by global warming and economic hardship by then? Will China already have beaten the US to the Moon, and be in the process of training astronauts for a manned expedition to Mars? Will we have the first picture of an Earth-like extrasolar planet? Will we have detected a signal from another civilisation from deep space? It could literally be a New World by then, in so many ways. I don't know whether to be excited or frightened by that thought.

But it's good to know we're planning the Next Great Mission.



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stevesliva
post Feb 20 2009, 12:29 AM
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QUOTE (vjkane @ Feb 19 2009, 07:46 PM) *
(There was a time when the only NASA planetary mission flying was Voyager with the repeatedly delayed Galileo mission as the only one in development. Those were the bad years.)

And too easy to forget when we want more more more... although missions to Venus might belie that exact scenario. wink.gif
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belleraphon1
post Feb 20 2009, 12:55 AM
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Well said Stu! I had the same thrill from Voyager and Galileo. And on top of that there is Ganymede and Callisto... forgive me folks, but there is something very intriguing to me about the sublimating seltzer surface of Callisto, and the tectonics on Ganymede...... and how the freak does Callisto have an ocean when it formed too cold to differentiate.?

We stand to learn do much...

Craig ... 72 in 2025

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