To Jupiter ... and beyond!

U.S./European collaboration
New NASA chief, Mike Griffin, has already backed in Senate testimony a Europa Orbiter. Accordingly, a team has been funded by NASA to take a quick look at the spacecraft needed, in terms of power, mass, travel time, and other items.

For planning purposes, this group is looking at launch dates for a Europa Orbiter in the 2012-2015 range, although the later dates are more likely in terms of funding, according to information distributed at the OPAG meeting.

In parallel with this work, a 10-person team of U.S. and European scientists is being tasked to scope out the requirements of such a mission and potential areas of collaboration. There is interest in shaping the Europa Orbiter mission as an international undertaking — patterned after the highly successful Cassini mission now orbiting Saturn.

Once underway, this study group would provide their findings in eight months time. At the moment, there is no official new start for the Europa Orbiter. However, NASA-internal talk now spotlights such a mission — including a version with a lander/impactor — as part of NASA’s fiscal year 2007 budget.

Slide show Jewels of Jupiter See images of Jupiter and its moons.

At the OPAG gathering here, there is support for a dedicated look at Europa, one of many moons circling Jupiter. A Europa Orbiter mission has been on start/stop status for many years.

Scientists are keen on resolving for sure "the ocean notion". That is, whether or not an ocean truly exists underneath Europa’s icy facade.

A top science goal of the Europa Orbiter would be to confirm or rule out the presence of a subsurface ocean on the moon. Additionally, an intensive study would be done of Europa’s icy crust, to scout out possible zones of liquid.

The spacecraft would also scan for organic and inorganic material on Europa — as related to its astrobiology potential and help set the stage for future exploration of the moon.

Thanks to the work of the Cassini spacecraft and Europe’s Huygens probe of Titan, this enigmatic moon also cries out for follow-up exploration. It has turned out to be an exotic, Earth-like world, but also exhibits bizarre differences.

Ralph Lorenz, a scientist with the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona in Tucson, is taking part in the OPAG meeting. He points out that Saturn’s Titan appears set to challenge even Mars as a priority target of exploration.

SLIDE SHOW   Titan images Images from the Huygens probe's landing on the Saturn moon.

Lorenz is an advocate for a Titan airborne platform. It would cover vast distances of Titan’s terrain, flying over possible lakes and seas of liquid methane and ethane. A new vista would be surveyed by the aerial platform every day. The airship would offer up, down, and side-looking sensing and carry out other research.

Under autonomous control, the robotic airship might even deploy sample devices, even mini-robots lowered by tether onto Titan, Lorenz speculated. This mission concept and others are detailed in a soon-to-be published paper in Advances in Space Research, he said.

"The outer planets program is an opportunity to look for life under the ice in the ocean of Europa. It’s a way to also look for, who knows, some unimaginable kind of life on Titan," said Jeff Moore, a space scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

By exploring the outer planets and the moons of these distant worlds, Moore told SPACE.com, you are studying radically different places that we’re familiar with, such as Earth and Mars. "It’s the visit to the truly exotic," he said.

Bagenal, OPAG’s chair, said that getting missions to the outer planets, due to the long travel distances, takes time and technology.

"We have to be clever and use technology to ask the right questions", Bagenal said. "And we have to be patient. These missions take a long time ... but they pay off."

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