Inside the Mission To Europa (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Ars Technica details the political and engineering battles being waged to make it possible for NASA to land a probe on Jupiter's moon Europa. They have new information about mission plans; it sounds ambitious, to say the least. "First, the bad news. Adding a lander to the Clipper will require additional technical work and necessitate a launch delay until late 2023. At that time, the massive Space Launch System rocket NASA is developing could deliver it to Jupiter in 4.6 years. Once there, the lander would separate from the Clipper, parking in a low-radiation orbit.

The Clipper would then proceed to reconnoiter Europa, diving into the harsh radiation environment to observe the moon and then zipping back out into cleaner space to relay its data back to Earth. Over a three-year period, the Clipper would image 95 percent of the world at about 50 meters per pixel and three percent at a very high resolution of 0.5 meters per pixel. With this data, scientists could find a suitable landing site. ...The JPL engineers have concluded the best way to deliver the lander to Europa's jagged surface is by way of a sky crane mechanism, like the one successfully used in the last stage of Curiosity's descent to the surface of Mars. With four steerable engines and an autonomous system to avoid hazards, the lander would be lowered to the moon's surface by an umbilical cord."

Comments

Re:Why?

[orpheus]

SpaceX's Dragon has already launched to orbit 8 times, including 6 full resupply missions to ISS, autonomously. It rides the Falcon-9, which has successfully reached orbit 18 times.

The manned Dragon capsule configuration (aka Dragon 2) is expected to do a demo flight in about a year. It was delayed by the accident investigation due to one faulty support spar (of which thousands had already flown) in May of this year. Falcon 9 is scheduled to return to flight in about a month, but it has a backlog of missions/payload before it can fly the Dragon 2 Demo flight, currently expected in the second half of 2016.

Yeah, we temporarily stumbled on manned space flight -- but we've done so before (e.g. after the two Shuttle disasters). It's not permanent.

Re:Why?

[Rei]

Indeed, there was actually a lot that flew on the Shuttle that couldn't have flown on any other launch vehicle - and we're not just talking people and a much more capable deployment system. Between 1988 and 2004 the Shuttle was the highest payload launch vehicle in the world. And the lower end of that range is questionable, as Energia never flew in its heavy lift configuration. In 2004 the Delta IV Heavy came online with slightly more payload capacity than the Shuttle, And really while it "came online" in 2004, its first successful launch wasn't until 2007. The Titan IVB came fairly close to the shuttle's nominal payload (which, BTW, could be increased in certain launch configurations) from 1997 to 2005, but wasn't as large. The same could be said about the Proton M from 1999 onwards and Ariane V from 2002. The Space Shuttle nonetheless had 15% more payload capacity and much more capable launch abilities than these systems (as well as being the only large payload return system in the world that ever operated for more than a few test flights). During the timeperiods these systems weren't available, the next closest systems to the Shuttle in terms of payload had only 3/4ths of its launch capacity.

Part of the reason they kept the Shuttle flying for so long (many had wanted to retire it much sooner) was that there were some ISS modules that could only be launched by the Shuttle.

There were a lot of things that nearly came to be that would have significantly boosted the Shuttle's payload even more, such as the ASRM. They had also started work on the five-segment booster, which would have vastly increased the Shuttle's payload (it's now part of SLS). If there had ever been demand, it had been determined that the payload bay could have been modified into a 30-74 seat passenger area, with a launch cost of 1,5 million USD per passenger (flights per passenger on Soyuz cost $20-40m)