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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."
An orbiter is nice but getting down to the surface and exploring on Europa its self is I believe, infinitely more informative than setting up shop in orbit. After all, the data we have on the moon suggests that it has an extensive conductive salty ocean underneath its surface that may have life swimming around vents that could exist in that ocean's floor like Earth.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
For a brief moment, I assumed the article was about a "manned mission".
Since we've barely spent any time on the moon or set foot on mars yet, I was about to praise NASA for suddenly growing some huge balls.
Mod parent up! It's cool and all that they're doing a Europa mission, but it's a disappointment to see the arrival dates that far in the future. The glacial pace at which these big missions take place is frustrating to say the least. What ever happened to "faster, better, cheaper"?? If only NASA could get an 800 billion "bailout"!
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
The basics don't change. You need a vehicle to deliver a probe. That means, fuel, engines, guidance system, computers, communications. These can be standardised. Landers need to be custom, but an orbiter needn't be.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
IANARS, but I've read many Wikipedia articles about the earlier NASA and USSR probes to Mecury, Venus, etc. It seems to me that those missions were faster (or at least no slower) than 11 years in planning, and there were a lot more of them. And that was way back before they had ICs like we have now.
And for mass production, I really don't see why certain parts can't be modularized. The problem of sending a probe to orbit a distant moon is the same whether it's Titan or Europa or Charon. Some details will be different, which is why you'd want modularization, so you can put some different instruments on the different probes to suit its particular mission requirements, but the bulk of the craft should be the same.
From Wikipedia's page on the Mariner program for instance: "All Mariner spacecraft were based on a hexagonal or octagonal "bus", which housed all of the electronics, and to which all components were attached, such as antennae, cameras, propulsion, and power sources." This was back in 1962, before ICs. The page doesn't say, but I'm pretty sure they didn't start the Mariner program in 1951.
There were 10 Mariner probes in all, with 7 being successful, launched over 10 years, all using the same basic parts and chassis. Mariners 11 and 12 turned into the Voyager probes, meaning those also benefited from the Mariner design and probably shared a lot of parts.
The industry and academia have been talking for years about building common buses and things, and some companies do sell components and even the bus (the core of the S/C, sans instruments), etc, but it still hasn't really been realized for LEO. It will probably never be realized for outer planet missions because the instruments are exceptionally complex and the environment incredibly challenging.
So NASA was able to design and successfully produce a common bus and chassis for 10+ years' worth of Mariner probes, back in 1962, but they can't do it now in 2009, almost 50 years later? Something about that doesn't seem right to me.
Please, please launch a landing probe similar to the Huygens Probe. There won't be any atmosphere, so you'll have to use retrorockets. Impact probes won't cut it. ;)
How could they pick this really unimpressive Europa mission over that? Aaargh!
The Titan mission looks very risky to me. I think that might have been a factor.
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The missions back in those "good old days" of space travel were much simpler both in scope, technical complexity, and duration. The longest of the Mariner missions, for example, was about 8 months, and it was only collecting data for a small fraction of that. We've already learned most of what we can (or at least what we can justify the cost of a launch for) with those simpler missions. This new Europa mission is going to be big. Even in physical size it will dwarf those old transistorized tin pots. NASA calls missions like this "Flagship" class. They are few, far between, and generally bring in floods of new information. This mission is on the scale of Voyager and Cassini.
Even back in the Voyager days, when the rocketry and resources (developed in the lull between Apollo and Shuttle) to launch such a mission were newly available, close visits to any of the planets beyond Mars were completely unprecedented, and NASA was anxious get underway it took five years. Cassini was first proposed 15 years and approved I think 10 years before it launched. Now that there's minimal hurry and a lot of other things to share the annual budget with, so the timeline is more like that for Cassini. The taxpayers don't want to pay out more per year, and besides, Europa isn't expected to go anywhere in the meantime.
As mission complexity and cost grows, getting the most out of it becomes increasingly important. You can't achieve that with a generic bus because it limits the instrumentation you can hang on it. Instead you tailor the bus to the power, thermal, geometric, stabilization, and other needs of all this really expensive and fancy instrumentation. If you need a 3-axis stabilized, nuclear-powered spacecraft with a large contiguous cavity for a big telescope like Cassini, you can't make effective use of a solar-powered spacecraft bus designed to be spin stabilized and provide a mount for a radar and a long magnetometer boom like Juno.
Instrumentation is another thing. Back in the Mariner days, they were generally taking the best instruments currently coming out of the labs and figuring out how best to use them for the mission. Lately, it's been more typical to examine what you want to know, what technically should be possible, and do the research, development, design and testing of an instrument optimized for its mission. As a result, science package development is often a primary pacing and budgeting concern for exploration missions these days.
Lastly, those ten Mariner probes in ten years were being concurrently developed, not one after the other. I'm not sure how many missions NASA had active or in development at any given time back in the 60's and 70's, or how much money was devoted to them. Right now, however, I'm aware of 13 solar system exploration missions currently operating, and five or six more in development. I'm really not sure how many earth and deep space observing missions there are (Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra, GALEX, WMAP, OCO, JWST, etc). All of these consume (I count 60+ total on NASA's website) consume less than a quarter of NASA's budget. It's rather impressive in the grand scheme of things.
To me it's frustrating to see these missions come into being, with a decade in between, and have a slow evolution in spaceexploration.
Why don't they start multiple missions, in short continious bursts, running through eachother, so we have in a decade a faster pace in exploration, and have data pooring in faster, shorten the development cycles, and gain greater experience in the process?
More modular crafts, maybe a higher failure rate, but greater experience and a list of issues to take it account. It would limit cost in the long run, missions wouldn't have such a binary outcome persé ("if failure, we'll have to redesign and wait another 10 years again").
I'm not an US-citizen, but I wouldn't mind to have my taxmoney carry the financial weight in an international effort to do something like that.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1