Europa PR, A couple of new posts to the Photojournal Options

[JRehling]

Thick or Thin Ice Shell on Europa?
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10131

Europa Tide Movie
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10149

I'm not sure that there is any new science involved. Seems to me like some nice eye candy for the purpose of getting Europa into the collective consciousness before the next flagship is chosen.

[dvandorn]

Io is just a whole order of magnitude more difficult to do, in-close. The radiation environment there is extraordinary. The surface conditions on most of the globe are straight from Dante's Inferno. Orbiters and landers would be fried extremely fast.

You almost have to do your Io science from something of a distance.

-the other Doug

[Mariner9]

Io is just a whole order of magnitude more difficult to do, in-close. The radiation environment there is extraordinary. The surface conditions on most of the globe are straight from Dante's Inferno. Orbiters and landers would be fried extremely fast.
-the other Doug

I agree that doing an Io Orbiter or lander would be really expensive. And the science payload on something like JSO is also very heavy and very expensive.

I was specifially reffering to the Billion Dollar mission class.... essentially a bit of a beefed up New Frontiers budget. For that price you could reasonably do a three axis stabilzed, moderately instrumented probe. Put it into a highly elliptical orbit and make repeated encounters. A single such flyby would return more data than Galileo did over it's entire mission. Even if the probe's electronics can only handle 10-20 flybys (which is roughly what Juno is designed for, IIRC) that is a hell of a science return.

I keep hoping Europe would step up to that plate, see a chance to do some exciting science that the US wasn't interested in. Unfortunately they appear to have been hi-jacked by the Europa Mafia.
They are also looking for partners. If that results in us somehow managing to afford both Titan and a Europa mission in the next 20 years, horay.

Otherwise.... shame they didn't jump at Io while we were engaged elsewhere. Or at just about anything in the outer planets... there are so many lonely targets out there. Bare Bones Uranian Orbiter anyone? Anyone?