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

No!

[obeythefist]

All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there.

Re:No!

[wonmon]

All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there.

First post together. First post in peace.

Re:No!

[adavies42]

i see the 2010 fan is still reading /.

2001

[jaavaaguru]

Watch out for the monolith!

Needed tags...

[Anonymous Coward]

"alltheseworlds" or "monolith"

Re:Needed tags...

[oldspewey]

How about "icantdothatdave"

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.

Re:awww no landing?

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Nobody really knows how to get to the ocean. It is certain to be many kilometers down. Having said that some seismic data would be handy. Its a pity we can't drop a simple lander on this trip with an impactor to generate a signal. Maybe an accurate laser altimeter would tell us about the interior?

Re:awww no landing?

[Anonymous Coward]

The probe will have a radar that will at least be able to characterize the ice and the ocean beneath it. As well as a number of other instruments. There is a bunch of information on this mission at this link: http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/doc.cfm?fobjectid=44038

Re:awww no landing?

[volcanopele]

An orbiter is needed before you send a lander for a few reasons. First, our global map of Europa is pretty rough, with only 13% of Europa was imaged at resolutions better than 1 kilometer. That is not good enough if you want to find a good spot to land on. While Europa may have a reputation for having the smoothest surface in the solar system, at the meter-decameter scales (on the size order of a lander), Europa is quite rough, with tectonics grooves criss-crossing the surface and no erosion to wear these features down. So high resolution imaging is need to find relatively smooth areas where it would be safe to land (global coverage at pixel scales of 100 meters is planned for the Jupiter Europa Orbiter with 1-10% coverage at 10 meters per pixel of targets of particular interest).

Secondly, an orbiter is needed to determine the thickness of the ice shell, which is important if you want to access the ocean. Designing a mission that needs to dig down through 2-5 km of ice is quite a bit different than digging through 20-30km. Plus, an orbiter might be able to find areas where the shell is thinner, further helping later lander developers pick a landing site.

Re:awww no landing?

[jamstar7]

How bout we check them out and see if there's life already there first before we go about trying to terraform them?

Re:awww no landing?

[Kagura]

Because we want to discover alien life, not life that has evolved from earth. I would not be impressed with finding that earth extremophiles can adapt to alien moons. I would, however, be rather thrilled at learning that non-earth-origin life had been more-or-less definitely found.

Re:awww no landing?

[oldspewey]

There have been proposals ... one of the more interesting ones involves a surface lander that also has a detachable probe along with a small thermonuclear generator. The nuke probe heats the ice and begins to melt its way downward, trailing a communication cable behind to connect with the surface probe. The ice refreezes above the probe as it descends.

Even if the (surmised) liquid ocean is several kilometres down, the probe will reach it eventually. As an added bonus, by using a radioactive heat source, any "hitchhiker" microbes of earthly origin are neatly sterilized before the probe comes in contact with the liquid below.

Re:awww no landing?

[man_ls]

What if there is life under there, but it's never been exposed to radiation before? We've basically dropped a pile of deadly toxic waste onto another planet that might have life on it.

Re:awww no landing?

[Iron Condor]

There have been proposals ... one of the more interesting ones involves a surface lander that also has a detachable probe along with a small thermonuclear generator. The nuke probe heats the ice and begins to melt its way downward, trailing a communication cable behind to connect with the surface probe. The ice refreezes above the probe as it descends.

...thereby freezing the communications cable in place, thereby preventing the probe from getting any further down. Pity.

Re:awww no landing?

[Muad'Dave]

As I posted previously, using Gd148 as an alpha only RTG will result in no radiation outside the sphere itself. Alphas cannot penetrate the outer layer of your skin or a piece of paper effectively, must less metal cladding.

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?

[frieko]

Every rock in the solar system has a different temperature, light insolation, and gravity. Given the different conditions, designing a 'standard' probe would be like designing a deep-sea submarine that could also climb Mount Everest.

Re:Eleven Years?

[ZankerH]

The departure date depends primarily of favourable launch windows (proper planetary alignment that allows for low-energy transfers). It's not because it takes ten years to plan and put together the mission. Sure, we could launch the thing tomorrow (or as soon as we put it together), but it'd take several times more energy to reach it's destination, which means more powerful rockets, if a powerful enough one exists. Keep in mind that most of the modern interplanetary probes are launched with the same rockets that launch commercial satellites to geostationary orbits, which is quite a few orders of magnitude closer than Jupiter.

Re:Eleven Years?

[Anonymous Coward]

IAARS (I am a rocket scientist), and I am sad to say that 11 years is actually pretty fast for this type of mission. Jupiter has been visited before, certainly, but generally we only swing through. Just the radiation (which is extreme) is a major engineering problem. Standard electronics simply do not function in that high a radiation environment, so a lot of custom ICs and such are required. Just maintaining data on the hard drive is difficult!

Jupiter is also hugely difficult in terms of design because solar arrays generally don't provide enough power that far out, so RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generators) are generally the preferred option for the outer solar system. If I recall correctly, we launched our last RTG in stock on Cassini, and the US hasn't been building any more, mainly because of public concern about "nuclear power in space and there an apocalypse."

There are a host of other problems, of course. The bottom line is that even in LEO there is no mass production system, except perhaps for a single constellation like GPS. Every mission is very different, and every mission has different objectives, environments, and everything else. It is so expensive to get into space that there is no slack in any of the metrics for the inefficiencies that come with mass production of a given piece of space hardware. That goes doubly so for outer solar system missions.

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.

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?

[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:Eleven Years?

[DerekLyons]

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.

Sure, the basic of a Jupiter orbiter don't change. Nor do the basics of a Mars orbiter. But a Mars orbiter isn't a Jupiter orbiter - the orbital environments are wildly different, as the grandparent said... it's like designing a deep sea submarine that can also climb Mt. Everest.

Re:Eleven Years?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The key thing to keep in mind here is MONEY.
NASA was spending a lot more money in the 60s and into the 70s than they are now.

The reason it takes so long is that they're trying to keep costs down. The crash programs of the 60s were very expensive in comparison to more recent science probe missions.

Mariner 1-10 cost $554 Million
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=MARIN1

Which comes out to roughly $3.75 Billion adjusting 1962->2007 dollars for inflation.

Voyager's total cost was $865 Million
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/didyouknow.html

Which adjusted for inflation 1972->2007 is roughly $4.2 Billion.

The Viking missions cost $935 Million in 1974 dollars, translating to $3.9 Billion in 2007 dollars.
http://solarviews.com/history/SP-4212/ch8-6.html

For comparison, Mars Pathfinder cost $150 Million in 1997 dollars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Pathfinder

Mars Phoenix Mission was around $420 Million
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/26/america/mars.php

The overriding them here is that we're spending much less money on this kind of thing that we used to, so the brute force method doesnt work as well.

Can you imagine NASA spending 1/5th of it's annual budget on a deep space probe at this point in history? I cant.

I also would argue strongly against the assertion that mass production of space probes is a good idea. The instruments on these craft are mostly one-offs and must be rigorously qualified. Mass production makes sense when you need something in numbers. It doesnt really make sense to make a large number of identical probes when unique probes that must probes that must flawlessly perform a specific task under harsh conditions are what is required.

Anyway, I just think it's important to keep the numbers in perspective here. We're not spending money on science like we used to. Like not even close.

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:Eleven Years?

[DerekLyons]

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 they were a hell of a lot simpler with much more modest science goals.
 
 

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.

Mostly because you wrongly assume the 10+ years of Mariner probes used a common bus and chassis. They didn't. There were some similarities in the structure, but that's about it, don't read too much into that one sentence from Wikipedia.

Re:Eleven Years?

[More_Cowbell]

Shouldn't we have off-the-shelf components and some semblance of a mass-production system for them by now?

I would posit that spaceX is among the first to attempt just that. I for one have been rooting for their success, as I think they can bring a revolution of sorts that is sorely needed in the field.

Re:Eleven Years?

[savuporo]

"The basics don't change. You need a vehicle to deliver a probe."
Yup, its commonly called "spacecraft bus" and its indeed commonly reused design for comsats but also for some planetary orbiters. ESA Mars Express and Venus Express shared a common bus and a few other pieces for instance.
However there are limits on how far you can take the commonality. For inner solar system, moderately-sized solar array works as a power system, for outer solar system it doesnt. Cooling requirements change with the distance from the sun, radiation environments change etc.

Re:Eleven Years?

[iamlucky13]

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.

Re:Eleven Years?

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

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.

How do you know that orbiters don't required quite different fundamental designs depending on the mission? For some missions you could end up with something that is over engineered and therefore more expensive. And how do you know that the custom parts aren't still taking up the most costs? I think the variety of missions and a low frequency of them make F1 cars look mass-produced in comparison.

Re:Eleven Years?

[amygdalae]

My point was that with an annual budget of $17 Billion, it's hard to imagine nasa spending 1/5-1/4 of that on one deep space probe with an equivalent budget of what they were spending in the 60s. NASA had twice as much money or more to go around in the 60s ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_budget ) and they had alot fewer earth science & environmental research responsibilities than they do now. If you dont want to be a troll, you should read the actual budget before accusing them of spending their budget on management, PR & swimsuit models.. I prefer the hard numbers to histrionics and hyperbole. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/168652main_NASA_FY08_Budget_Request.pdf So for 2008 the total budget is $17.3 Billion $5.5 Billion for Science -- 1.5 Earth Science -- 1.0 Heliophysics -- 1.4 Planetary Science -- 1.6 Astrophysics $3.9 Billion for Exploration Systems -- 3.0 Constellation Systems (Orion) -- 0.85 Advanced Capabilities $0.55 Billion for Aeronautics Research $0.5 Billion for Cross Agency Support Programs (Education, Business Partnerships, etc.) $6.8 Billion for Exploration Capabilities -- $4.0 Space Shuttle -- $2.2 International Space Station -- $0.5 Space and Flight Support So if you really break it down the 1/3 of the budget is for hard science & research, 1/4 is for Orion/Next generation manned spaceflight, about 1/3 for existing manned spaceflight (shuttle & station) and the rest for education, etc. There isnt alot there to go around. And if this is all so important to you all, write to your senators. I for one think that $17 Billion for earth & planetary science & space exploration is a pretty sad pittance compared with our spending on same 40 years ago, and especially in light of our 3 Trillion dollar war in the middle east. We can spend all that money in Iraq & Afghanistan but people get their panties in a wad about spending any money on science & exploration. Sad.

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

[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.

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:glacial pace

[DerekLyons]

Whenever building something like this, the first one is always the most expensive, and after that the incremental cost is much cheaper.

Not as much as you might think. While development does run up a hefty bill, assembly does too because of the enormous amount of testing, verification, and QA involved in actually building the components and then assembling them into a spacecraft. Actually operating the probes runs up a hefty bill too - and one with near zero economies of scale.
 
 

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)

Why? For most science goals, you'll get the same amount of science from 10 probes as you would from one - you'll just get it earlier and pay a hell of a lot more to do so. You won't actually get more science.

Re:glacial pace

[Iron Condor]

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

It omits the fourth free parameter: risk. Systems engineering operates in a four-dimensional envelope: Cost, Scope, Schedule, Risk.

Tinker with any three of these at the cost of the fourth.

Re:glacial pace

[windsurfer619]

Tell me, is it cheaper to make one probe to orbit Europa for 3 years, or make two probes that orbit for 1.5 each? Maybe these scientists have already thought about economics of scale, and have decided to put all their eggs in one basket. After all, they are rocket scientists...

Unfortunately

[Anonymous Coward]

Due to a typo the mission was programmed to land in Europe instead.

Re:Unfortunately

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Due to a typo the mission was programmed to land in Europe instead.

... our mission to find intelligent life continues.

Huygens

[Kagura]

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. ;)

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

[Lumpy]

Actually we could make one melt through the ice with a nuclear reactor on board, but it would take a REALLY LONG TIME to use a melt+gravity system to get to the ocean below. even if we could keep the probe at 20degC it would take nearly 2 years for it to melt through and drop into the ocean based on the gravity the moon has.

And that's the easy part. Get me a communications system that will transmit first through several miles of "ice" and then the orbital distance without a directional gain antenna to the relay satellite above.

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.

Re:Huygens

[PetiePooo]

And that's the easy part. Get me a communications system that will transmit first through several miles of "ice" and then the orbital distance without a directional gain antenna to the relay satellite above.

How about the probe leaves a relay station on the surface and feeds a cable behind it as it descends. Once through the ice, the probe transmits to the antenae below the ice, which the relay station retransmits to the orbiter.

Who needs new high tech when we have current tech that works?

BTW, the problem I see it is carrying that huge thermal generator through several years of space travel where disposing of extra thermal energy is a constant problem. There's no convection in a vacuum...

Really?

[poity]

European Space Agency picks the planetoid named after Europe? Who didn't see this coming?

Re:Really?

[gslj]

European Space Agency picks the planetoid named after Europe? Who didn't see this coming?

You may be joking, but actually the Europeans chose a planet named after a pretty girl. So, as you say, who didn't see this coming? (Europa's the one that Jupiter came to in the form of a bull. Europe's named after her, not the other way around).

-Gareth

Anybody but me horribly disappointd by the choice?

[Rei]

I mean, come on. The Titan mission had an nuclear sterling engine powered orbiter that was going to fly through the plumes of Enceladus with special equipment to study, was going to drop a floating lander with an illuminated video camera into a known Titan sea that could look for floating matter, waves, and detect prebiotic and even biochemistry going on in the liquid, and a Montgolfier nuclear-hot-air-balloon that would study the organic chemistry going on in the atmosphere, make detailed maps of the surface (studyin things like cryovolcanoes and alluvial channels), and after the initial mission completed, likely make low passes right over the surface.

How could they pick this really unimpressive Europa mission over that? Aaargh!

Why not?

[r00t]

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

Do you have some sort of terminal illness? Are you thinking of killing yourself? Did you publish something negative about Putin?

Maybe you'll make it.

We can rebuild you. We have the technology. Better than you were before. Better, stronger, faster.

Re:Anybody but me horribly disappointd by the choi

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Cost cutting measures?

[MemoryDragon]

After all a trip to Europe is cheaper than a trip to the moon ;-)

Parallell missions

[ZeroExistenZ]

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.