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ESA Selects Next Generation Space Missions
davecl writes "The European Space Agency has announced the results of its Cosmic Visions 2015-2025 call for proposals. Fifty space science missions for the next decade were proposed, with just seven selected. They range from X-ray and far-infrared observatories to planet finders and a near-earth asteroid sample return mission. These seven, together with the LISA gravitational wave observatory, will go ahead for further study in the next few years, and then two will be chosen for launch in 2015-2017."
Air is pretty darn useful for carrying away heat by conduction and convection flows. So the XBox 360 should have more overheating problems in vacuum.
Physicists can't resist this kind of question...
- Laplace. To study the Jovian system (three orbiters, one entirely dedicated to Europa!) in collaboration with NASA.
- Tandem. To study the Saturnian-Titanian-Enceladusian environment (orbiter+carrier with a balloon and 3 probes to Titan) in colaboration with NASA.
- Marco Polo. Sample return mission from an asteroid (à la Hayabusa) with orbiter+lander, sampler and return capsule; in collaboration with JAXA.
- Dune/SPACE. Two proposed missions to study dark matter and dark energy.
- Plato. Extrasolar planets detector, capable of detecting rocky planets.
- Spica. Infrared telescope with wide field of analysis, spectroscopy and coronograph; in collaboration with JAXA.
- XEUS. X-ray telescope to study extreme environments from L2 halo orbit, consisting on a mirror satellite and a detector satellite flying in formation.
- Cross-Scale. Proposed to employ 12 spacecraft, would make simultaneous measurements of plasma - the gas of charged particles surrounding Earth - on different scales at shocks, reconnection sites, and turbulent regions in near-Earth space.
[thanks to eeergo from NSF for the short list]At least one of the first two (Laplace or Tandem) will almost certainly be selected, the second one approved will probably be an astronomy mission (i.e. observation of objects outside of the solar system).
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
Yes, but neither Laplace nor NASA's proposed Europa Orbiter will answer the question of whether there is life on Europa. The upper few meters of Europa's surface have been effectively sterilized by particle radiation from Jupiter's magnetosphere, removing all trace of life that may have made its way to the surface. Most plausible life on Europa would likely be much deeper, within the internal ocean. To answer THE question WRT Europa would require a lander and probably a sub.
The Gish Bar Times - Blog covering Jupiter's moon Io
Space missions aren't particularly resource-intensive; after all, the probes rarely weigh more than a few tonnes. They're expensive because they use a lot of staff time and rocket scientists aren't cheap, but about the only resource that they use which is in any sense rare is xenon for ion drives. Bits of space probe are quite often machined from solid ingots of relatively costly materials like inconel, but generally you can recycle the chips.
An Ariane 5 burns 25 tons of liquid hydrogen in 130 tons of liquid oxygen, and is assisted by about 480 tons of ammonium perchlorate and aluminium powder in the solid rocket boosters; the materials costs are trivial in comparison to the cost of the engineers who designed and assembled the machine. Liquid oxygen is significantly cheaper than milk (say 10 cents per kilogram), and 130 tons is much less than the daily consumption by even a modest steelworks; liquid hydrogen is cheaper than beer at about $4 per kilo.
It is very wierd indeed, that Europe, being a massive economy world wide, only can affort marginal space efforts. ESA should be at least as ambitious as NASA, but it is not.
For one, they are relatively new at it. NASA's been doing lots of missions for a long time. Europe has only been lightly dabbling so far.
Second, is that they have more beurocracy because they want to make sure member countries get an equal share. It is sort of like the Osprey military project in the US where states all wanted a shake and also helped lobby to keep it alive despite unsolved safety problems. NASA has a little of that, but has learned to work around it and reduce it over the decades.
Table-ized A.I.
Let me be the first to say : what about a manned mission to Mars? I don't care that it's more efficient and easy to send robots, I don't care that it would have little scientific justification, I want human beings to go there just because it would be mind-blowingly awesome!
While cool, personally I get more satisfaction out of seeing new worlds. I was totally psyched when the Titan Huygens lander mission started posting photos on the internet. This was a new, cloudy world never before seen from under the clouds and the probe was even designed to float in case it landed in a hydrocarbon ocean. Thus, there was a small chance we'd see it bobbing up and down in liquid. (Unfortunately, it didn't land in the area of the probable active lakes, but only dried ones.)
A mission that explores the underground oceans of icy moons of the gas giants would be cool also. Or finding and seeing the spectrum of earth-like planets in other systems thru special telescopes. That's the kind of thing I'd rather see the money spent on: brand new discoveries and worlds are like prying the lid off of a large stone box found under an ancient pyramid. It is just more Eureka moments per dollar.
As far as public interest, finding an Earth-like planet around another star would result in Saturday morning cartoons, comic books, movies about settlers, etc. It would be like the mystique of Mars before Mariner 4 showed how dry Mars was.
Table-ized A.I.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
I'm afraid it might take a bit more then that. Feasibility speaking landing a probe on europa isn't *that* difficult. Nothing to scoff at, but certainly within our limits. Automated drilling through the ice, though? And this is more then a few meters to find liquid water. How exactly do we *do* that? Then the sub. How do you power it? Not solar. Nuclear would make a big stink with environmentalists (bringing nuclear waste on your search for life!?) if you could even *get* a nuclear powered up that far (reactors aren't small...). No air, so that pretty much leaves batteries. How long can we have a sub explore with batteries? A day or two at most?
No, there are problems that need to be solved before we can explore europa for life. And one of those problems is solved by landing on it and just looking at the surface a bit. Is it stable? Could something sit on its surface for a few months without trouble? How hard is it?
But the search for life on europa isn't something to plan for "this decade."
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
"mind-blowingly awesome" also loses out to the problem of: Can we get them there and back alive? If everyone dies, suddenly it become mind-blowingly stupid. We will see long term inhabited space stations with centrifugal gravity and greenhouses before we will be sending live humans on multi-year missions outside of Earth orbit.
We are all just people.
As someone closely associated with the selection process, let me add a little background that might be helpful to interested /.ers.
1. In principle just two of these missions will proceed to flight in 2017-2018, following studies of all seven over the next couple of years. However, the important number is the 950Meuro budget envelope allocated for this round of Cosmic Vision: depending on how costs shape up during the study phase, we go for a different mix of missions. That number is the cost to ESA itself: you also need to factor in anticipated additional contributions (e.g. for payload) from ESA member states and third party countries (e.g. US, Japan, Russia, China).
2. One poster suggested that either Laplace or Tandem was most likely to fly in one slot, with an astronomy mission in the other: this is in no way decided, at this point. We sent Laplace and Tandem through at this stage as NASA is looking closely at the same basic missions; indeed, for either to fly would require strong (majority) NASA partnership, as ambitious outer solar systems missions cost more like $2G, rather than the ~600-650Meuro ESA might put in. Following discussions and a selection process in the US, one or other of Laplace or Tandem will go through to the full European study stage. Then, in order to proceed to flight, we will need to decide whether we prefer that mission over XEUS or LISA for the 2017-2018 slot: they are the other L(arge)-missions selected for study.
3. Dune and Space were similarly selected in the full knowledge that the US is planning a Dark Energy mission as well. Further talks with NASA on competition, collaboration, and complementarity in ths arena are very likely.
4. Keep in mind that this is just the first round of Cosmic Vision: we anticipate a second selection round in 3 years or so, at which point other missions may be selected, perhaps from those of the seven here not finally picked for flight in the first round, perhaps from the 43 others which did not make it this far (some were felt to be extremely interesting, but not ready technologically for 2017-2018), or perhaps something new altogether.
5. Finally, yes, we'd all like to have more money available to ESA to fund these and other exciting missions: we have plenty of interesting ideas. Europeans should think about writing to their parliamentary / governmental representatives about exactly this point. That said, it's not quite true to say, as someone did, that we're newbies in this game: ESA has been involved in a whole bunch of excellent astronomy and solar system missions already (Giotto, Rosetta, ISO, SOHO, XMM, Mars Express, HST, to name but a few), some alone, some in collaboration. There are more to come over the next few years as well (e.g. Herschel, Planck, Gaia, JWST), so watch this space (sorry).
This is an INCREDIBLY ignorant statement.
Any and all probes designed to go out past Mars or so are powered by nuclear sources. Sunlight gets extremely weak the further you go, and Jupiter is a LONG way out there and solar panels simply won't work. They WILL BE NUCLEAR, no matter who wants to protest. The recent Cassini and New Horizons probes were both nuclear powered.
With one single exception, such probes are NOT nuclear reactors as we have on earth, but generally RTGs. Simply plutonium-238 generating a few hundred watts of heat, and a Peltier/Seebeck device to convert the heat to electricity. Quite small, and NASA's developments with Sterling engines will make it much, much more efficient (needing even less Plutonium).
As for waste, RTGs do NOT generate long-lived waste, like the common nuclear power plants. In fact it would be terrible at generating electricity if it did. The plutonium just keeps generating heat until it is depleted.
RTGs are also NOT powered by gamma emitters like nuclear reactors. That would be far too difficult to contain with the weight limits of spacecraft, and would quickly destroy the internal systems. So even if there is a catastrophic accident, it'll just be a chunk of heavy metal that happens to stay warm for a couple centuries, emitting some short-lived particles that won't even be detectable a few feet away.
In fact Apollo 13's RTG is still chugging away at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and nobody seems to care (never mind the 1,000+ lost somewhere in Russia)... They are designed to withstand extreme forces, so even the above scenario is unlikely.
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