Jupiter Distant Orbiter Options

[gndonald]

This is something I've been thinking about over the last few days and I'd like to post it here for discussion.

I got an idea for a Jupiter probe, which I term the Jupiter Distant Orbiter.

The instrument fit is primarily particles and fields, with the objective being to map the radiation belts/magnetic field from outside the orbit of Callisto. The probe would also be fitted with a 'HiRISE - style' camera to enable photography of the moons/Jupiter.

The orbit used would be one that is highly inclined so that the probe is never occluded by Jupiter itself.

Comments?

[Roly]

There was an interesting Jupiter Distant Orbiter-esque proposal at OPAG earlier in the year. It was called the Ganymede Observer I believe, and its main feature was the MIDAS (Multiple Instrument, Distributed Aperture?) platform - which (apparently) enabled considerably more science return for equivalent volume/mass. Looked like an impressive innovation, that MIDAS, despite the potential integration problems, ITAR etc.

I wonder if it could be part of an New Frontiers 3 "Galileo 2" type proposal. Or as part of the Europa Explorer for better than MRO resolution of interesting regions (especially repeat coverage over time).

Incidentally, does ICER compression still work properly at Europa? I presume it is durable enough with the radiation environment, given that ICT worked (I'd love to know the full story behind that, the few papers I saw, one from 1991, and the snippets on how hard it was to implement on the AACS processor is terrifying.)

Roly

[ugordan]

ICER is just a compression algorithm. If you can manage to build a processor hardened enough to reliably execute instructions I don't see why it wouldn't work. I don't know about those snippets about Galileo (would love to find out more!), but I assume an AACS processor just wasn't general purpose "enough" to readily support heavy trigonometry calculations.