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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."
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."
Obama resigned the US to defeat when he cancelled Project Constellation without extending the Space Shuttle program..
That's pretty clueless. Here's why. The Space Shuttle went nowhere after it demonstrated the conditional viability of reusable launch vehicles in the 80s. There's nothing that flew on the Shuttle that couldn't have been more cheaply flown on some other launch system. Further, the money spent on the Shuttle prevented the US from doing a lot of manned and unmanned work.
Constellation was no better for the same reasons. It's also worth noting that Constellation would not have survived competiton with the ULA launch vehicles (Atlas V and Delta IV), if the same cost and safety criteria had been applied to them as were applied to the ULA vehicles. However, the report that supposedly decided things in favor of the Constellation configurations (Shuttle-like stack), did so by deliberately understating risk of solid rocket motors, ignoring thrust oscillation of Ares I, and a few other deep problems of the configuration they chose. Then they came up with a completely bogus risk analysis to justify the choice they made.
We also ignore here that Bush did all the heavy lifting. By the time Obama came in, Shuttle and Constellation were both already walking dead.
SLS is a pale congressional substitute that is still being actively impeded and slow-walked by is cronies at NASA.
Crying shame really since we really need another dead end program to consume all that funding we could have used on real space projects. And it doesn't help that SLS is also underfunded by Congress, the only ones who claim to want it.