Leonard David has a nice story on a vehicle that’s being built almost in his back yard. Let’s hope Webb doesn’t eat up all the funding for it.
4 thoughts on “Jupiter Bound”
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Leonard David has a nice story on a vehicle that’s being built almost in his back yard. Let’s hope Webb doesn’t eat up all the funding for it.
Comments are closed.
Juno is a very rare example of a science probe that I can’t get excited about, and that suggests to me that almost no one will get excited about it.
In terms of science goals, Juno doesn’t even nod toward searching for life or showing us new frontiers. In terms of engineering goals, proving that solar power can be used that far out is fine, but hardly innovative (as opposed to using a stirling based system, for example).
I care about finding life; maybe you care about in-situ resource use (leading to spreading our own sort of life); either way Juno comes up short.
Better candidates, as far I’m concerned, for my goals, and for what I think the American public would care about, would have been TESS (unlike kepler, it would have tried to find the very nearest, most analyzable, ultimately most reachable extrasolar planets, but it was not selected), and would have been a variety of proposed probes for searching for life and showing us new frontiers, by taking a closer look at Europa, Titan, and Enceladus, or even just adding better life detecting equipment to MSL, or finally trying to figure out what the UV-absorbers in the Venusian cloudtops are, or — well, I could go on, and list any number of proposed unselected unmanned probes that would have been a better use of the funds than Juno.
Isn’t JUNO a re-fly of sorts for some of the science that was compromised by Galileo’s antenna failures?
While the results from TESS are potentially exciting, Juno will produce results that have more near term implications (it’s going to a while before we get the results of any follow on star probes. Unless the one eyed, purple people eating aliens are invading we have the time.)
I wonder why they would choose solar power for the thing? I also suspect you could do multiples of TESS for the price of a Juno.
What are the near-term implications of Juno’s results? I’m all for pure research, but considering the cost, this seems like a waste of trip to Jupiter. I’d greatly appreciate a sell job on Juno. Huygen’s landing on Titan was one of the most exciting things I’ve experienced in space exploration in a long time, Galileo was still pretty fantastic, and if Juno could make me feel 1/1000th of the excitement of Huygens or 1/100th of Galileo, I’d be happier about the mission.
I believe they chose solar power because we are short on the appropriate radioactive isotopes (PU-238, I think), but don’t take my word for it. Stirling generators would have been another way to conserve plutonium (although obviously not replace). Google ASRG.
As for extrasolar planets, the most interesting near-term thing we can do with them is do spectral analysis to find the signs of life. TESS would be a first step in that direction.
If the focus remains on the outer planets, alternativemissions could focus on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn in the search for life. An alt-Juno might have even looked for life signs in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
If finding life elsewhere has no near-term implications for you, so be it, but I think the public would find it intrinsically interesting, unlike the results from Juno. (But please correct me if I’m wrong — I’d love to be sold on Juno instead of feeling like it was a missed opportunity for a rare outer planets mission.)