[X] My Assistant

[elakdawalla]

The Planetary Society has issued a call to action, for people to contact House Science Committee Chairman Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) to demand that NASA not cut their 2006 spending on science priorities like Europa before their 2007 budget has even taken effect; and to demand that they reconsider their priorities in the 2007 budget. Go to our Space Advocacy page for more on how to participate in this campaign. Please participate!

--Emily

[Guest_Analyst_*]

However, Analyst's comments appeared to make the argument that you just can't do Outer Planets missions without going to the Flagship Class.

I doubt that this is what he meant to imply, but I would like to point out that all is not lost. I think the first two New Frontiers missions, New Horizons and JUNO, show that you can go to the Outer Planets for a lot less than Flagship costs.

Good point. My fault, I have to be more specific. I was thinking about orbiters, because I believe you need them to really understand and explore an outer planet and it's moons, rings etc over time. New Horizons is a special case, a late "Voyager" doing an initial exploration of an unkhown world. Once you have been there by a flyby craft, you eigher know it's uninteresting to come back or you need an orbiter.

Well Juno is an orbiter and it's withhin New Frontiers (700 m$). But as you point out: It's a spinning craft with a very limited power supply, it avoids the interesting things (moons, rings) because of radiation and it carries a very limited suite of instruments. It's like a today's Pioneer 10 going into orbit. Maybe worth doing, but limited. It's camera is only for outreach: on a spinner, no filters, low resolution ... No Spectrometers etc.

The only remaining New Frontiers class craft to an outer planet is imo some kind of entry probe. But you better have orbiter for data return (or a flyby "bus") and you get a few hours of data maximum with no global context (therefore you need the orbiter). A Saturn entry probe as long as Cassini is working is an option (you even have a S-band link), but this window is closed.

I hope this clear things up.

I agree with you: better fly something now than nothing ever.

Analyst

[mcaplinger]

[Juno's] camera is only for outreach: on a spinner, no filters, low resolution ...

JunoCam does have filters -- it's a tricolor pushframe system that uses TDI to get good SNR given the spin rate. I think the images will be pretty spectacular, especially if we can take more per orbit than the very modest baseline.