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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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: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.

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.

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.