European scientists on Feb. 3 auditioned three teams competing to carry out Europe’s next billion-dollar mission but acknowledged that for all three the selection will depend on decisions to be made not in Europe, but in Washington and Tokyo.Representatives of NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) were present to lend moral support to the three projects, but said they were unable to commit to any of them yet. Whether they will be able to do so by June 21, the date Europe’s science mission selection body is scheduled to meet, was unclear.“What will be decided depends on the selection made by [European] science advisory bodies and on the outcome of discussions with NASA and JAXA,” said Fabio Favata, head of the science planning office at the 18-nation European Space Agency (ESA). “We may not be able to get a firm engagement by NASA or JAXA by then, but we will have further indications of their priorities. The fact is that all three of these missions transcend the capability of any one agency and will require major international collaboration.”
04.11.2011An update on IXO from Nick White and Jay BookbinderUS IXO Team,This is an update on the discussions with the European Space Agency (ESA) at the recent ESA-NASA bilateral meeting. This was reported by Jon Morse (HQ Astrophysics Division Director), first, to the IXO and LISA teams on Tuesday, and then, at the Astrophysics NASA Advisory Committee (NAC) sub-committee meeting on Thursday afternoon.IXO was one of three candidates competing for the L1 opportunity in ESA´s Cosmic Vision Program (2015-2025). The Astrophysics and Planetary decadal rankings and NASA´s constrained out-year resources projected in the President's FY12 budget request led ESA to conclude that none of the three mission concepts were feasible within the Cosmic Vision L1 schedule. Consequently, ESA has ended consideration of IXO and the other concepts as partnerships at the scale proposed in the New Worlds New Horizons decadal survey (NWNH) and EJSM/Laplace in Visions and Voyages for Planetary Science. Instead, ESA has begun a rapid definition effort that includes the formation of a new science team (to be announced shortly). That effort will identify science goals and a mission concept that can be implemented as part of an ESA-led mission launching in the early 2020´s for a cost to ESA of about 800M Euro. Revised mission concepts from the three science areas will be considered in a selection process tentatively foreseen in February 2012.A future minor role for NASA in the new ESA-led X-ray mission, in particular contributions at the instrument level, has not been ruled out. NASA will participate in the new ESA science team through a "NASA HQ-empowered scientist." This will be a NASA civil servant scientist who will be the conduit for any engagement with the new ESA team.
Southwood was referring to NASA’s March announcement that it could not participate in any substantial way in any of the three Large (L)-class science missions that ESA was considering for the next decade. Of the three missions that reached ESA’s final competition, two depend heavily on NASA participation. ESA has now given all three L-class mission teams until early 2012 to regroup and reconsider their projects in light of NASA’s decision. But for two of the three missions, NASA’s absence may be equivalent to running a race with only one leg.
With international partners like this, perhaps Europe should start an upper stage programme...
NGO (ex-LISA) will track for the first time the elusive ‘gravity waves’ predicted by General Relativity, thus giving birth to a new kind of astronomy from space. Complementing the traditional astronomy studying the electromagnetic spectrum, NGO will attempt to detect the tiny ripples of space-time due to the fundamental force of gravity. The mission is currently undergoing reformulation activities as ESA led mission.JUICE (ex-Laplace) is a mission to Jupiter. The mission concept is based on multiple flybys of a number of Galilean Moons prior to eventually entering into orbit around Ganymede. A payload suite of 11 instruments including remote-sensing and in-situ suites will provide new insight into the Jovian system. The mission is currently undergoing reformulation activities as ESA led mission.ATHENA (ex-IXO) has evolved from the IXO mission concept following the L class reformulation exercise and is the next-generation X-ray space observatory designed to study the hot, million-degree universe (e.g. supermassive black holes, evolution of galaxies and large-scale structures and matter under extreme conditions). The ATHENA concept is based on a fixed structure connecting two identical telescope optics with the focal plane instrumentation consisting of a Wide Field Imager (WFI) and X-ray Microcalorimeter (XMS). The mission is currently undergoing reformulation activities as ESA led mission.
The JUICE (JUpiter ICy moon Explorer) concept results from the reformulation of the EJSM-Laplace mission into a European-led mission:http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=49837
Yellow books for the other two Cosmic Vision L1 missions are also available.ATHENA (ex-IXO):http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=49835NGO (ex-LISA):http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=49839They are also planning to use ESA launchers. Of course, only one of the three missions will be chosen. In a couple of months we'll know which one...
A proposal to study Jupiter's icy moons is now the front runner for selection as a billion-euro space mission.However, formal selection of the mission will have to wait until a European space committee meets to discuss the contenders in May.
The European Space Agency (Esa) is to mount a billion-euro mission to Jupiter and its icy moons.The probe, called Juice, has just been approved at a meeting of member state delegations in Paris.It would be built in time for a launch in 2022, although it would be a further eight years before it reached the Jovian system.
The mission will cost Esa on the order of 830m euros (£695m; $1.1bn) over its entire life cycle. This includes the cost of manufacturing the spacecraft bus, or chassis, launching the satellite and operating it until 2033. This sum does not however include Juice's 11 instruments. Funding for these comes from the member states. When this money is taken into account, the final budget for Juice is expected to be just short of 1.1bn euros.It has not yet been decided which European nations will provide which instruments. An Announcement of Opportunity will be released this summer with a view to identifying the instrument providers by the start of next year. The final and formal go-ahead for Juice should be given in 2014. In Esa-speak, this stage is referred to as "adoption". It is the moment when all the elements required to build the satellite are in place and the full costings are established. It is also the point at which any international participation is recognised.At the moment, Juice is a Europe-only venture, but there is every possibility that the Americans will get on board.The US space agency (Nasa) walked away from the idea of producing a companion satellite to Juice - a spacecraft that would orbit Europa rather than Ganymede - due to programmatic differences and budget concerns. Nonetheless, there is a strong desire among the American scientific community to have some involvement in Juice, especially in those aspects that concern Europa.
Esa selects 1bn-euro Juice probe to Jupiterhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17917102QuoteThe European Space Agency (Esa) is to mount a billion-euro mission to Jupiter and its icy moons.The probe, called Juice, has just been approved at a meeting of member state delegations in Paris.It would be built in time for a launch in 2022, although it would be a further eight years before it reached the Jovian system.QuoteThe mission will cost Esa on the order of 830m euros (£695m; $1.1bn) over its entire life cycle. This includes the cost of manufacturing the spacecraft bus, or chassis, launching the satellite and operating it until 2033. This sum does not however include Juice's 11 instruments. Funding for these comes from the member states. When this money is taken into account, the final budget for Juice is expected to be just short of 1.1bn euros.It has not yet been decided which European nations will provide which instruments. An Announcement of Opportunity will be released this summer with a view to identifying the instrument providers by the start of next year. The final and formal go-ahead for Juice should be given in 2014. In Esa-speak, this stage is referred to as "adoption". It is the moment when all the elements required to build the satellite are in place and the full costings are established. It is also the point at which any international participation is recognised.At the moment, Juice is a Europe-only venture, but there is every possibility that the Americans will get on board.The US space agency (Nasa) walked away from the idea of producing a companion satellite to Juice - a spacecraft that would orbit Europa rather than Ganymede - due to programmatic differences and budget concerns. Nonetheless, there is a strong desire among the American scientific community to have some involvement in Juice, especially in those aspects that concern Europa.