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Europa Orbiter, Speculation, updates and discussion
mars loon
post Dec 15 2005, 11:54 PM
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Some bad news about the prospects for a Europa Orbiter have just been posted by Lou Friedman of The Planetary Society

see this link:

http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects...e_12142005.html

first 3 paragraphs:

By Louis Friedman
December 14, 2005

In the recently passed NASA Appropriations bill, the US Congress directed NASA to begin work on a Europa orbiter and to make a request for a new start for a Europa mission project in fiscal year 2007. This was welcome news to NASA, who lost their focus on Europa when the nuclear propelled Jupiter Icy Moon Orbiter mission was cancelled last spring.

But now word has it that there will be no Europa proposal in the 2007 budget proposal that will be made to Congress early next year. The Washington Aerospace Briefing, a respected newsletter publication of Space News, is reporting that the Administration’s Office of Management and Budget is denying the Europa request on budget grounds.

The Planetary Society will fight for a Europa mission. Whether or not is in the budget request, we will lobby in Congress for its inclusion in the NASA program. Our Explore Europa Campaign is already in full swing. Having Congress insert funds in the ’06 budget was a good start, but we need to ensure support in 2007 and beyond.
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Guest_vjkane2000_*
post Dec 16 2005, 01:52 AM
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NASA's science budget is a mess -- too many missions, several with large overruns. It would be irresponsible to add a $1B+ mission into the pie until everything else gets straightened out. What might be useful, though, is some early development money next year to get things moving again.
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_*
post Dec 16 2005, 04:34 AM
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The plan was to just insert about $10 million this year for initial design studies -- including making absolutely sure that they DO want to fly Europa Orbiter before any of the other possible Flagship-class missions. Once again, we have a case of the idiotic manned program eating the rest of NASA alive.
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Decepticon
post Dec 16 2005, 01:23 PM
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QUOTE
Once again, we have a case of the idiotic manned program eating the rest of NASA alive.


I could have not said that better!
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Guest_AlexBlackwell_*
post Dec 16 2005, 08:08 PM
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QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Dec 16 2005, 04:34 AM)
Once again, we have a case of the idiotic manned program eating the rest of NASA alive.

Not that I don't think that NASA's manned space program is becoming a larger and larger money pit, but I'd like to see hard evidence that money not spent by NASA there would be transferred over to space science. A great many legislators appropriate funds for Shuttle/ISS because the money is spent in their districts for that specific purpose. It's amazing how many people believe that eliminating billions of dollars from the NASA EMSD would automatically result in an increase for NASA SMD.

This post has been edited by AlexBlackwell: Dec 16 2005, 08:09 PM
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_*
post Dec 16 2005, 11:36 PM
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The very fact that Congressmen fund NASA as pork to their home districts indicates that if the manned-program budget was cut, SOME of the money thus saved would get transferred to the unmanned program.
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mars loon
post Dec 18 2005, 06:21 AM
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QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Dec 16 2005, 11:36 PM)
The very fact that Congressmen fund NASA as pork to their home districts indicates that if the manned-program budget was cut, SOME of the money thus saved would get transferred to the unmanned program.
*

I dont see how you can make that connection. Your suggestion may or may not be true

Hopefully this truly worthy mission does get funded somehow, despite the gloomy outlook.
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scisys
post Dec 27 2005, 05:21 PM
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QUOTE (mars loon @ Dec 18 2005, 02:21 AM)
I dont see how you can make that connection. Your suggestion may or may not be true

Hopefully this truly worthy mission does get funded somehow, despite the gloomy outlook.
*


It has always seemed to me that the problem with the manned program is not that allocated funds are coming at the expense of the unmanned programs. The problem is that *cost overruns* in the manned program are carved out of the hide of the unmanned program. This nails you every year even after a mission is scoped and funded. Heck it even nails you during ops.

Still, this argument has been going on since forever. The reality is that the unmanned program has to live within the boundries defined by the, admittedly excessive, needs of the manned program. I don't like it but I don't see a way to change it. It is inlikely that money cut from the manned program will end up in the unmanned program. However, a reined-in manned program would be less of a yearly threat to the unmanned program and cause fewer 're-engineerings', 'budget exercies', 'descopes', 'stand-downs', 'development deferrals' ... pick your favorite euphemism for feeding the beast that is the manned program.

My personal feeling on a Europa mission is that it needs to focus on two questions: "is there (still) liquid water (for sure)?" and "where are the thinnest parts of the ice?". One has to hope the answers will be such that the justification for follow-on missions will lead to penetrators and landers, etc. The tendency towards a Galileo style tour must be avoided at all cost. It should be a Europa only tour. Otherwise the flight ops budget alone would kill the mission when you start adding all the systemic requirements for mission planning and resource allocation. I know we don't go out there very often and Jupiter ain't Mars, but I don't see any Galileo/Cassini style missions coming along anytime soon (or long term to be honest).

Perhaps a Europa mission should become a near term component of the Origins Program (would that be a good thing or more likely to kill it?)
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_*
post Dec 28 2005, 01:38 AM
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Actually, the Europa Orbiter is a good deal more complex as a mission than a replay of Galileo would be, given the technology and experience we now have. Indeed, a Jupiter orbiter that makes dozens of Io flybys is one of the second-rank candidates for a New Frontiers mission -- which means, given NASA's likely change to the NF proposal rules, that they'll accept ideas for it in the next round of NF selections in 2008. Such a craft would make Ganymede and Callisto flybys anyway to keep modifying its orbit to fly over different parts of Io's surface and at different phase angles, so it could easily be turned into a mission to study all three of the remaining Galilean moons. Indeed, it could be a virtual duplicate of the Europa Orbiter but with much less onboard fuel -- the radiation shielding for EO would allow such a craft to make at least 25 close Io flybys (maybe 50; I've got to recheck my records).

In fact, since EO itself will have to make a total of about a dozen Ganymede and Callisto flybys to get into position for Europa orbit insertion, it is virtually certain to make major observations of those moons -- and Jupiter itself -- during the 18 months or so before it goes into orbit around Europa itself.
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scisys
post Dec 29 2005, 06:17 PM
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QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Dec 27 2005, 09:38 PM)
In fact, since EO itself will have to make a total of about a dozen Ganymede and Callisto flybys to get into position for Europa orbit insertion, it is virtually certain to make major observations of those moons -- and Jupiter itself -- during the 18 months or so before it goes into orbit around Europa itself.
*


I guess this is one of the tendencies I think probably dooms a Europa Orbiter. I really do understand the forces which would drive the desire for such observations (particularly given the loss of atmospheric dynamics data from Galileo) but such observations do not come for free. Building this into a reference mission plan will lead to instrumentation choices driven partially by such observations. It is expensive to develop such observation plans. Would there now be a scan platform? That costs in many ways (hardware design, assembly and test; ops planning software; constraint checking; etc.). No scan platform? Then you have the attendant fights over spacecraft orientation. An S/C designed to be an orbiter can be purely a nadir look design with perhaps a side look radar.

Allowing for 'cruise science' grows the flight team during what could be quiescent time. Getting into orbit aroudn Europa *is* complex. It just seems to me that a mission design that avoids any additional complexity or design drivers would have a greater chance of approval. By allowng cruise science you now require an S/C that is part fly-by and part orbiter. Throw in serviing as a delivery bus for a lander and you are starting to talk real money. As more is added, there is a non-linear increase in integration costs.
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_*
post Dec 30 2005, 02:46 AM
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There has always been a firm restriction applied to Europa Orbiter designs: no supplementation or change at all in the spacecraft for pre-Europa science. That being said, the new design for the mission -- which uses Earth gravity-assist flybys, and thus allows them to carry fully half a ton of additional payload into orbit around Europa -- would seem to provide some flexibility for this possibility.
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nprev
post Dec 30 2005, 08:51 AM
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I wince at asking this given the tight budget constraints, but has any thought been given to maybe adding a simple surface science experiment to EO? Something like the Deep Space 2 penetrometers with conductivity, salinity and maybe seismic sensors or a sonar transducer/receiver for crust mechanical property measurements could provide a LOT of vital information that is otherwise quite difficult or impossible to interpolate from remote sensing. A low-power low-rate UHF FSK data link would be quite sufficient for the probe support equipment suite, I would think...

Understand that the necessary sterilization procedures might prove too onerous and expensive for this to even be considered, aside from the existing budget problems...but the beauty of this concept is that most of the instrumentation I described has already been engineered to rugged deep-sea oceanographic standards as COTS equipment. NOAA uses this stuff all the time (and, no, I wouldn't expect them to punch through to any hypothetical ocean...but wouldn't that be cool!!!! tongue.gif )


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A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_*
post Dec 30 2005, 02:45 PM
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The debate over whether to use that huge new payload margin to put a small piggyback lander on EO was one of the primary subjects at the November COMPLEX meeting, since there has already been quite a lot of design work on possible landers with varying degrees of complexity. (In particular, there was an unbelievably long drawn-out wrangle over whether a seismometer and magnetometer might be worthwhile on a small short-lived lander, which eventually began to resemble that 10-year debate among the savants on Jonathan Swift's Laputa over how long to boil a 3-minute egg.)

The group was nowhere near a recommendation when the meeting ended, but the impression I got was that there wasn't much enthusiasm because it is probably impossible for such a small lander to drill down deep enough into the surface to find any organic compounds that haven't been hopelessly scrambled by Jupiter's radiation -- and without that, the science return from a lander is just not that high. The leader of the team of graduate students who did the hypothetical "Endurance" lander design study described in a poster at the December AGU meeting told me that his group had reached the same conclusion: it would probably be more scientifically productive to put that extra mass into more Orbiter science instruments, a higher bit-rate communications system, and (especially) more shielding to prolong the orbiter's working lifetime in Europa orbit. (It takes 100 kg of shielding to extend the Orbiter's lifeime there by 1 month.)
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nprev
post Dec 30 2005, 07:19 PM
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Oh, well; at least it was considered. Thanks, Bruce!

I am surprised that surface (or just below!) conductivity/permittivity studies wouldn't be considered high priority; we could learn a lot about the amalgam of salts present in the crust--and therefore those present in the possible ocean--that way. sad.gif


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Guest_AlexBlackwell_*
post Jan 26 2006, 10:54 PM
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QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Dec 16 2005, 11:36 PM)
The very fact that Congressmen fund NASA as pork to their home districts indicates that if the manned-program budget was cut, SOME of the money thus saved would get transferred to the unmanned program.

Just to follow up...

In the January 27, 2006, issue of Science, Jeffrey Plescia, of JHU/APL, in one of three letters ("Thinking About NASA's Future") responding to Science Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy's Editorial in the November 25, 2005, issue ("NASA: Back to eating seed corn"), closes with the following:

QUOTE
NASA cannot do everything it wants nor all of what the scientific community wants within a fixed budget; priorities must be established. Without a long-term human spaceflight theme, NASA will not continue. To assume that if the exploration initiative and human spaceflight went away, that space science would receive a fiscal windfall is sophomoric.
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