[X] My Assistant

[gndonald]

Amongst the documents available on the Spaceflight PDF website, is a report released by the Ames laboratory in the aftermath of the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 flybys of Jupiter. It proposes modifying the basic Pioneer spacecraft so that it could be used to carry out orbital missions to Jupiter and Saturn (The 14mb file can be downloaded here.).

The proposed modifications would have left the instrument fitout essentially unchanged while providing increased power through the use of Voyager model RTGs. Launches in 1982 (Leave Earth 01/Jan/82, Arrive Jupiter 10/Mar/85) and 1985 (Leave Earth 14/Apr/85, Arrive Jupiter 04/May/87) and in 1983 (Leave Earth 05/Jan1983 Arrive Saturn 10/Dec/1987) and 1986 (Leave Earth 20/Jan/1986 Arrive Saturn 03/Jan/1991) were contemplated.

As we all know these missions finally materialized as Galileo and Cassini.

One has to wonder what the scientific results would have been if these (admittedly lesser) craft had been sent to Jupiter and/or Saturn in the aftermath of the Voyager flybys.

Any ideas?

[mcaplinger]

One has to wonder what the scientific results would have been if these (admittedly lesser) craft had been sent to Jupiter and/or Saturn in the aftermath of the Voyager flybys.

Any ideas?

Interesting stuff. Such a spacecraft at Jupiter would have been able to concentrate on particles and fields stuff, and
left Galileo free to concentrate on imaging and remote sensing, instead of the overly-complex,
spun/despun section, do-everything-poorly design it was ultimately stuck with.

Of course, the money wasn't there to do this mission. It's hard to get a straight answer about the ultimate scientific return
of the Galileo mission. Certainly it didn't provide the sort of eye candy that Cassini has; I was recently looking through
a coffee-table book about the Galileo mission (MOONS OF JUPITER by Kristin Leutwyler) and was struck at how poor
most of the imaging was. Obviously the mission was terribly constrained by the antenna failure, but all the happy talk about
how well mission objectives were recovered seems hard to support with the end product.

I'm sure there's a fascinating book to be written about the Galileo mission (infighting between Ames and JPL, all of the delays,
all of the in-flight problems) but I've not seen it yet.

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Of course, the money wasn't there to do this mission. It's hard to get a straight answer about the ultimate scientific return
of the Galileo mission. Certainly it didn't provide the sort of eye candy that Cassini has; I was recently looking through
a coffee-table book about the Galileo mission (MOONS OF JUPITER by Kristin Leutwyler) and was struck at how poor
most of the imaging was.

Are you sure about that? lol. Have you seen the mosaics that Exploitcorporations has made and posted in this thread?

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showforum=48

[mcaplinger]

Are you sure about that? lol. Have you seen the mosaics that Exploitcorporations has made and posted in this thread?

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showforum=48

Some of those are astonishingly good. I wonder if someone with a real Web site could host these in a more browsable form.

MOC @ Mars is an interesting case. Have the novel discoveries tapered off? Exponentially, logarithmically, etc?

Tough question. Since we've imaged such a small fraction of the planet at MOC resolution there could be another major discovery in an image we just took today. In terms of papers in SCIENCE, on the other hand, the discovery rate has tailed off, but that might be in part because of the science analysts also working on other stuff (MRO, MSL, etc.) I don't think you could find very many LPSC abstracts about Mars that didn't use MOC data, though.