Is Europa really the "highest priority" of the community?, Cleave said it was at LPSC? Options

[nprev]

Mark Peplow has an update in his LPSC blog.

Definitely some wisdom there, and let's face it: In this new budgetary climate, it's time to go for the low-hanging fruit.

Based on our best current information, an Enceladus landing/investigation is much less daunting from a complexity and risk perspective than going to Europa, and therefore it might be much more palatible to the "suits"...and quite possibly cheaper. If nothing else, an Enceladus lander would undoubtedly refine the technologies needed to tackle Europa with less mission risk.

[mchan]

Good list...you could also add Stardust and Deep Impact in parentheses, given their possible extensions.

Rosetta is another.

[Bob Shaw]

Rosetta is another.

Aaargh! How could I have, er, you know? Damn.

Bob Shaw

[dvandorn]

First, as I said, Mars is in a category all by itself -- the NASA brass recognize it as a gold mine for them funding-wise, and so missions for it are considered super-high priority by NASA regardless of what the actual planetary-science community thinks. (Jeff Bell tells me that Mars scientists, who benefit from this, are bitterly known by other planetary scientists as the "Mars Mafia".)

I'll bet this "Mars Mafia" sits around and endlessly reinforces their own notions that we ought to cancel all non-Mars planetary exploration, on the theory that all the money that's being "wasted" on these flagship missions to non-Mars destinations will automatically get spent on more Mars probes -- eh, Bruce?

-the other Doug

[Tom Tamlyn]

Emily Lakdawalla's latest blog entry has a characteristically thorough and insightful discussion of the debate over outer planets exploration strategies. I would love to see the graphics she refers to, especially the diagram prepared by Torrence Johnson.

I'll take this opportunity to agree with the Cosmic Rocker's comment that "Emily's blog has become _the_ blog to read for the latest summary of planetary news." The level of detail she provides permits "planet spotters" to have a sense of vicarious participation in the business of planetary science that would otherwise be very difficult to achieve. Lots of us are jealous of her job, but it's hard to imagine anyone doing it better.

TTT

[Bob Shaw]

An improved version of the list:


Active interplanetary spacecraft currently returning science data:

1. Messenger
2. Venus Express
3. SMART-1
4. Ulysses
5. MGS
6. Mars Odyssey
7. MRO
8. Mars Express
9. Spirit
10. Opportunity
11. New Horizons
12. Rosetta
13. Cassini
14. Voyager 1
15. Voyager 2

Semi-active interplanetary spacecraft:
16. Hayabusa

Spacecraft in orbital storage, with potential for extended missions:
17. Deep Impact
18. Stardust

Spacecraft in orbital storage, with no planned extended mission:
19. Genesis

The list does not include science spacecraft in Solar orbit; those included have all had, or are planned to have, at least one encounter with a body other than the Earth.

Bob Shaw

[ljk4-1]

Though it has not been heard from since 2000, Pioneer 6 may still
be phoning home solar data since its launch in 1965:

http://www.space.com/news/spaceagencies/pi...act_001209.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_6

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I'll bet this "Mars Mafia" sits around and endlessly reinforces their own notions that we ought to cancel all non-Mars planetary exploration, on the theory that all the money that's being "wasted" on these flagship missions to non-Mars destinations will automatically get spent on more Mars probes -- eh, Bruce?

-the other Doug

Well, they're certainly trying to maximize spending on Mars probes at the expense of other planetary exploration and space science. That's why they're called the "Mars Mafia", after all. And, no, they don't think that "all" the money spent on other types of space science would go to Mars probes if those other space science missions were cancelled -- any more than I think that "all" the money spent on the manned space program would go to the unmanned space program if the manned program were cancelled. They just realize, like any sensible person, that a significant slice of it would.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Emily Lakdawalla's latest blog entry has a characteristically thorough and insightful discussion of the debate over outer planets exploration strategies. I would love to see the graphics she refers to, especially the diagram prepared by Torrence Johnson.

I'll take this opportunity to agree with the Cosmic Rocker's comment that "Emily's blog has become _the_ blog to read for the latest summary of planetary news." The level of detail she provides permits "planet spotters" to have a sense of vicarious participation in the business of planetary science that would otherwise be very difficult to achieve. Lots of us are jealous of her job, but it's hard to imagine anyone doing it better.

TTT

It was an excellent piece of work -- and I also agree with the conclusion the group seems to be trending toward. Namely, that we already KNOW what the next necessary step is in exploring Europa -- the Orbiter -- whereas we don't have any clear idea yet what we should do at Titan and/or Enceladus, and will need several more years of Cassini observations to decide. Therefore, first things first: unless Cassini turns up something really spectacular and radical -- and the only thing I can think of that might adequately upset the applecart would be the discovery by Cassini of very complex organics in Enceladus' plume -- we should proceed with pushing Europa Orbiter first.

(That's where Flagship-class missions are concerned. The one other possibility -- finding valid New Frontiers-class missions to send to any of those three worlds -- is an entirely separate matter anyway, and will be handled separately.)

[elakdawalla]

Aw, shucks, guys...

I think only very few diehard Titan fans would seriously advocate Titan over Europa today, for the reasons thoroughly covered by Torrence. Europa first, then Titan. But I sure hope we don't have to wait for the CEV to be developed before another flagship mission is started. If that happens, by that time Europa may well have some tough competition.

I've still got my Hayabusa notes to write up...stay tuned for that (but probably not until after the weekend).

--Emily

[Mariner9]

This whole situation reminds me a lot of the early 80s. I will admit that we are in much better shape on the whole, with many missions flying, and several in developement. But in one reguard it seems like history repeating itself. The planetary scientists are obsessed with one mission, and a very expensive mission it is. They keep pushing it, and are circling the wagons insisting it is the one true next step. Yet the message continues to be from above: we can't fund a mission that big right now.

Well, that was about where we were with the Mars Sample Return mission in the post Viking years. Everyone kept pushing big missions, and the biggest was MSR. It took major pressure from NASA headquarters (and Congress) to get the point across that MSR wasn't going to happen as the next mission to Mars, and wasn't there something, anything, that could fly in the meantime.

Eventually NASA scaled back on Venus Radar Mapper... and Magellen was approved. Only a year later Mars Observer was approved. They were the first new starts in seven years, and the only happened because political reality was finally admitted, and NASA submitted missions that were low enough cost to fit within the current budget reality.

I agree with someone earlier who stated that it's one thing to get a 600 million dollar New Horizons Pluto mission approved by grass roots lobbying, but quite another to get a Flagship mission approved using the same game plan.

If history is a guide here, I'd think the best move at this point would be for the OPAG and like minded scientists to accept that a 1.4 billion dollar mission just is not going to happen. But a 700-800 million dollar mission might stand a chance.

Better to focus on moving up the next New Frontiers mission and having the competition be based on Outer planets only (Comets and Venus will have to wait). There is still a LOT that a Galileo type tour of the Jovian system could teach us, not only about Europa but also Io and the rest.

[mcaplinger]

Emily Lakdawalla's latest blog entry has a characteristically thorough and insightful discussion of the debate over outer planets exploration strategies.

I wonder if one problem is that both Galileo and Cassini have been very expensive missions. I think the OP community might have been better served by a larger number of somewhat smaller missions. Unfortunately the FBC pendulum has swung far away from smaller missions, and it is hard to build constituencies for them -- big missions tend to force coalitions between groups that otherwise would be competing for the same resources.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

There are other problems with running small missions to the outer System. First, the outer System is just unavoidably bloody hard and expensive to explore -- only one Discovery finalist has ever been aimed at an outer world, and it isn't that easy to properly explore them even with New Frontiers-class missions.

Second, the things we have been trying to observe -- unlike those in the inner System -- usually comprise miniature solar systems in their own right, and they include a hell of a lot of different types of physical phenomena that are going on simultaneously and interacting with each other, so that you need simultaneous observations of them with a large number of different instruments to properly understand them. It's not impossible to break them up -- Galileo and Cassini, for instance, could theoretically have been broken up into three missions each, consisting of an entry probe, a spin-stabilized magnetospheric orbiter, and a fully stabilized remote-sensing orbiter -- but the total cost of all this is a lot higher than for a single unified craft, and again you're going to miss some important simultaneous overlapping observations from instruments on the three separate missions.

Third, the gap between missions to an outer world is so damn unavoidably long. If you find something interesting from an initial simple and low-cost outer-world spacecraft that is worthy of investigation with another type of instruments, then, no matter how much funding you've got, you have to twiddle your thumbs for YEARS, or decades, before that additional set of instruments can get there -- which provides another strong motive to carry as many different kinds of instruments as you can on the very first mission.

[Stephen]

I agree with someone earlier who stated that it's one thing to get a 600 million dollar New Horizons Pluto mission approved by grass roots lobbying, but quite another to get a Flagship mission approved using the same game plan.

If history is a guide here, I'd think the best move at this point would be for the OPAG and like minded scientists to accept that a 1.4 billion dollar mission just is not going to happen. But a 700-800 million dollar mission might stand a chance.

Better to focus on moving up the next New Frontiers mission and having the competition be based on Outer planets only (Comets and Venus will have to wait). There is still a LOT that a Galileo type tour of the Jovian system could teach us, not only about Europa but also Io and the rest.

But would such a mission tell us anything significantly more about Europa that would allow NASA to drop the need for a dedicated Europa orbiter and go straight to the lander-cum-borer-cum-diver mission? If there still needs to be an EO first somewhere down the track wouldn't that make another Galileo-type-tour, for all the useful science it might acquire, merely a stopgap mission?

======
Stephen

[ugordan]

But would such a mission tell us anything significantly more about Europa that would allow NASA to drop the need for a dedicated Europa orbiter and go straight to the lander-cum-borer-cum-diver mission? If there still needs to be an EO first somewhere down the track wouldn't that make another Galileo-type-tour, for all the useful science it might acquire, merely a stopgap mission?

Actually, the proposal for EO was that it would spend something like a year and a half doing a Galileo-type tour of the 3 Galileans, adjusting its orbit in preparation for Europa orbit insertion and then the primary science phase would begin, lasting 'only' a month or so. So you already get a tour with the orbiter as is. A dedicated tour-only mission seems like a waste of time and resources in that light.