Europa Selected As Target of Next Flagship Mission

volcanopele writes "NASA and the European Space Agency announced today that they have selected the Europa/Jupiter System Mission as the next large mission to the outer solar system. For the last year, the Europa mission has been in competition with a proposal to send a mission to Saturn's moon Titan, as reported on Slashdot earlier. The Europa Mission includes two orbiters: one developed by NASA to orbit the icy moon Europa and another developed by ESA to orbit the solar system's largest moon, Ganymede. Both orbiters would spend up to 2.5 years in orbit around Jupiter before settling into orbit around their respective targets, studying Jupiter's satellites, rings, and of course the planet itself. The mission is scheduled to launch in 2020 and arrive at Jupiter in 2025 and 2026."

Comments

Eleven Years?

[macraig]

Jeez, when it takes eleven years to get even an unmanned mission like this off the ground, I have to wonder if we meatsack critters ourselves are ever gonna make it off again. Certainly not in my lifetime, I guess. I have a hard time accepting that unmanned mission design is still this hard, even after all the missions that have preceded this one! Shouldn't we have off-the-shelf components and some semblance of a mass-production system for them by now?

Re:Eleven Years?

[macraig]

I think your statement oversimplifies some obvious truths to the point of absurdity. Certainly there will always be SOME components that have to be custom creations, but there should be others that would readily lend themselves to off-the-shelf modularity and mass production. Craft that simply make passes and orbits, as these are intended to do, would lend themselves most readily of all to that modularity compared, to, say, the Mars rovers.

Standardization of key components should be a key goal in further missions. Emulating Charles Babbage's design philosophy at this stage is likely to doom us to permanent residence here.

Re:Eleven Years?

[macraig]

I grew up firmly convinced that I was going to be in one of the first waves to emigrate from this rock. How could I not think that after seeing Armstrong thump onto the moon when I was still a little kid? How could I anticipate how far backward our stupid human frailties would make us slide? It's been very depressing for me to have to relinquish that expectation. Looking at the big picture of my life, that single thing was a significant reason for my loss of faith in humanity (and it's been downhill ever since). While there are INDIVIDUALS who possess the vision, AS A SPECIES we completely lack any vision or direction. There simply is no prescriptive Big Picture, not even a Five Year Mission. Humanity has let me down.

Maybe the Star Trek mythos is more correct than Roddenberry realized: it seems that we will in fact need a serious kick in the pants, as a species, from Vulcans or something else just as epiphanal. I wish I wasn't just joking about being a Vulcan Tourist.

Re:glacial pace

[volcanopele]

What ever happened to "faster, better, cheaper"??

Mars Polar Lander happened. If you actually want to perform comprehensive science at these targets, you actually need to spend money.

In other words, you can have two out of three of "faster, better, cheaper", but not all three at the same time.