An interesting idea suggested by Andrew LePage involves a Europa-Io Sample Return by flying through the plumes of each respective moon:
1-Second, funding issues. Bolden has already admitted he's bite at a billion dollar probe, so odds now favor a scheme that fits a New Frontier budget. 2-Four, science. Of course we want more photos in better detail, and answers to the ocean and life enigmas. But when you say you have a piece of that moon, you'll get an avalanche of eager scientists storming in. A few samples of ocean salt won't answer everything, but it will definitely help answer some of the bigger questions around Europa.
NASA is asking the scientific community to help it devise a relatively low-budget mission to Jupiter's moon Europa, perhaps the solar system's best bet to host alien life.The space agency announced Monday (April 28) that it has issued a Request for Information (RFI), officially seeking ideas from outside researchers for a mission to study Europa and its subsurface ocean for less than $1 billion (excluding the launch vehicle)."This is an opportunity to hear from those creative teams that have ideas on how we can achieve the most science at minimum cost," John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the NASA Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington, said in a statement. "Europa is one of the most interesting sites in our solar system in the search for life beyond Earth," Grunsfeld added. "The drive to explore Europa has stimulated not only scientific interest but also the ingenuity of engineers and scientists with innovative concepts."The deadline to submit ideas under the RFI is May 30, officials said.
The Decadal Survey deemed a mission to the Jupiter moon as among the highest priority scientific pursuits for NASA. It lists five key science objectives in priority order that are necessary to improve our understanding of this potentially habitable moon.The mission will need to:• Characterize the extent of the ocean and its relation to the deeper interior• Characterize the ice shell and any subsurface water, including their heterogeneity, and the nature of surface-ice-ocean exchange• Determine global surface, compositions and chemistry, especially as related to habitability• Understand the formation of surface features, including sites of recent or current activity, identify and characterize candidate sites for future detailed exploration• Understand Europa's space environment and interaction with the magnetosphere.
So come June there'll at least be a few ideas on the table in addition to Europa Clipper. The increase in Planetary Science is excellent but without that full $2 billion for 'Clipper we need to find what other options are possible. Whatever those options will be the Decadal Survey that recommended Europa to begin with may be the guide (although naturally a smaller mission might only sate a few goals):
So, going by priority, finding the depth and extent of the subsurface ocean comes first followed by chemistry.
This is OMB pushing the issue. OMB wants NASA to see what is possible at the $1 billion level. I know a lot of people who think that the answer is that decadal level science cannot be accomplished at that lower level. And the reason why Europa is on the table, and why people have been talking about it, is to do the science described in the decadal survey (flipping that on its head, there's no reason to do a Europa mission if it is not going to accomplish that level of science; might as well just wait another decade and try again).Now I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing to do. After all, we might get some interesting mission proposals out of it, and there is value to doing mission proposals, because--as an example--the next time there is a decadal survey it helps to know some of the options ahead of time.
The risk is that the politicians will go off and approve a mission just so they can say "We are doing Europa!" when that mission doesn't accomplish interesting science. There is also a risk that this could kill the next New Frontiers opportunity, and that would annoy a lot of people with interests in the Moon, Venus, Saturn, comets, and other targets. It would also lead to a lot of programmatic chaos.
Put more succinctly, if you do a flyby mission, it should provide enough data so that you can go to a lander mission next and not have to repeat another flyby or orbiter mission. That means that the mission should gather high resolution imagery of the surface to enable a lander.
That's why I see this more as a positive. It opens opportunities. Everyone says it must be a flagship...but only because nobody seriously looked into what a smaller spacecraft might do. That's not engineering, that's presumption.
BETHESDA, Md. — If NASA sends a nuclear-powered probe to Jupiter’s moon Europa, it would launch no sooner than 2024, and effectively rule out other nuclear missions to the outer solar system before then by tying up the specialized infrastructure required to produce plutonium-powered spacecraft batteries, a senior NASA official said here.“If the Europa mission goes nuclear, it needs four or five [Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators],” Curt Niebur, a program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, said in a July 23 interview here during a meeting of the NASA-chartered Outer Planets Assessment Group. “That’s quite a few. If Europa needs that many, that sucks up all the output for the production line between now and 2024. There’s no more left."Clipper will likely need such a power source, but the U.S. Department of Energy, which owns and operates all the equipment needed to refine plutonium-238 and press it into pellets usable by an MMRTG, now plans to shut down its aging pellet-stamping hot press at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, after 2015, when the department plans to produce one last batch of pellets for the single MMRTG needed for Mars 2020, a sample-caching rover based on Curiosity and slated to launch in 2020.Len Dudzinski, program executive for radioisotope power systems at NASA headquarters, said in an interview here that the Department of Energy “won’t promise us to be able to support Europa without a new hot press.” NASA, not the Department of Energy, is on the hook to pay for the new equipment.
That process will likely start in 2015, Carroll said. When it is done, the press will be taken offline until a new one can be installed. The Department of Energy hopes the new machine will be online by 2017. After that, the department could press enough fuel to prepare one flight-ready MMRTG a year, Carroll said.
Might need to add the last part of the SpaceNews article.QuoteThat process will likely start in 2015, Carroll said. When it is done, the press will be taken offline until a new one can be installed. The Department of Energy hopes the new machine will be online by 2017. After that, the department could press enough fuel to prepare one flight-ready MMRTG a year, Carroll said.2017 is probably optimistic for these things, but nevertheless, it is not a permanent end of Pu pellet production.
This is not a surprise to anybody who has been following either the Pu-238 subject or Europa mission plans closely. They've been saying things like this--although not loudly--for almost a year now. The context is that a lot of the Pu-238 production infrastructure is in poor shape and they need to replace equipment. I was talking to one person familiar with the whole issue. He said that NASA was initially concerned that they were getting stuck with too much cost, but after a group looked at the infrastructure, they said that if anything, NASA is getting off easy, because there are a lot of associated infrastructure costs that are hidden, and fortunately NASA is not being charged for them.
Quote from: Blackstar on 07/29/2014 02:04 pmThis is not a surprise to anybody who has been following either the Pu-238 subject or Europa mission plans closely. They've been saying things like this--although not loudly--for almost a year now. The context is that a lot of the Pu-238 production infrastructure is in poor shape and they need to replace equipment. I was talking to one person familiar with the whole issue. He said that NASA was initially concerned that they were getting stuck with too much cost, but after a group looked at the infrastructure, they said that if anything, NASA is getting off easy, because there are a lot of associated infrastructure costs that are hidden, and fortunately NASA is not being charged for them.So it will be the DOE who picks up the majority of the cost of updating this equipment.
Sorry for asking a rather basic question but: could the "$1 billion" Europa missions be designed (like Clipper) to take either a VEEGA trajectory after launch on Atlas or a direct trajectory after launch on SLS? Or is there something about $1b that makes that not possible?
Europa Clipper Would Wash Out Other Nuclear-powered Missions.