[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?

[Exploitcorporati...]

I feel compelled to jump in on this one. It almost appears that Galileo was abandoned from a PR standpoint in terms of imagery. Hundreds of stunning photographs of Europa were returned, most from the multiple extended missions. Several large swaths of terrain recieved excellent medium-resolution coverage, any many small-scale features were covered with tightly defined footprints(perhaps impossible for Cassini) that reveal some of the most freakishly contorted landforms in the solar system. Bob Pappalardo mentioned that it had been planned to release the mosaics constructed by the Galileo SSI team over the internet, but the effort fell by the wayside. He has also pointed out that MTF(modulation transfer function) filtering has not been run on Galileo's images, which would sharpen them considerably. Color data is limited but certainly usable. More than enough material is available from this truncated but very sucessful mission to fill an attractive, well produced coffee-table volume, or a comprehensive website for that matter. It is a mystery to me why, considering that the dataset is but a tiny fraction of those produced by Mars missions, more of an effort has not been made by NASA to visually turn the Galilean satellites into actual worlds for the public.

Edit:
mcaplinger: a website is under construction, albeit slowly, and should be up by about mid-March.
Decepticon: yes, at least until carpal-tunnel syndrome sets in or Europa thaws out.