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

awww no landing?

[wizardforce]

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.

glacial pace

[snooo53]

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"!

Re:glacial pace

[Grishnakh]

This is a good point, I think. If you look at some of the early NASA probes to Mercury and Venus, they were essentially copies of each other, or very similar, and shared many parts.

The other poster's point about design becoming technologically obsolete is correct, but underscores this person's point in a way: instead of just launching one mission at a time, these space agencies need to make 5-10 copies at a time, and launch them all around the same time (or within a few years). Sure, it wouldn't make sense to try to use 70s or 80s technology on a probe now, but if they were launching 10 or even 50 of them within the next 3 years, then they could easily take advantage of some economies of scale. Whenever building something like this, the first one is always the most expensive, and after that the incremental cost is much cheaper. So they're really missing out by not making copies.

Re:Eleven Years?

[jamstar7]

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.

Re:Eleven Years?

[Grishnakh]

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.

Re:Huygens

[AtariKee]

Steve Squyres of the Mars Rover mission won't be in on this one, but about ten years ago on BBC's The Planets series, he discussed designing a lander/sub mission to Europa. The lander would melt through the ice, turn into a sub, and start exploring the ocean beneath.

While I'm optimistic that this will happen someday, I'm sad that I won't see it in my lifetime.

Re:Huygens

[Muad'Dave]

Not for a a couple kg of Gadolinium 148. Pop a chunk of that on the surface and down, down it'll go. According to this fascinating article on alpha particle energy in medicine, a 0.2 kg cube of Gd148 can produce approximately 120W. A 2 kg block would produce 1200W of power and be scorching hot for most of it's almost 75 year half life. What makes it even sexier is that its a pure alpha emitter - safe as can be to humans unless ingested/inhaled. Its only decay product is a stable isotope of Samarium.