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| Cover of the April 2013 issue of A&G, Credit: Oxford Journals |
The Oxford Journals magazine Astronomy and Geophysics has just published my report on a meeting
hosted by Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society back in December (Fletcher, 2013, Future Exploration of the Outer Solar System, Astronomy & Geophysics 2013 54: 2.14-2.20). The article goes into much more detail, but here I've posted a similar report that I delivered to NASA's Outer Planets Assessment Group back in January 2013. The Royal Astronomical Society has been
around since 1831, and is chartered to promote astronomy, geophysics and solar
system science here in the UK, with over 3000 members and premises in
Burlington House, Piccadilly. Each month
they sponsor one-day discussion meetings on topics of interest to the
community. These are mainly aimed at
raising awareness of issues within the UK community, but every so often we have
meetings that encourage more international participation, such as this
one.
Chris Arridge and I proposed and ran a meeting on future
exploration of the outer planets with the following aims: (1) to continue the momentum of our studies
for an ESA-led mission to an ice giant; (2) to review and discuss the high
priority objectives of future missions and telescopic observations of the outer
solar system; and (3) to bring together scientists and engineers involved in
preparation for ESA’s JUICE mission.
After a busy couple of years with proposals for both ESA’s M3 mission
(Marco-Polo-R and EChO currently the planetary missions in competition) and L
mission (JUICE selected last May), it was hoped that this would be a rather
optimistic and hopeful end to 2012. What
emerged from the meeting, from my perspective, was that there’s no shortage of
great ideas, achievable concepts and tantalising destinations for the outer
planets community.
We were fortunate to have the funding to invite two overseas
speakers to provide keynote talks, and asked Mark Hofstadter to provide us with
an update on the prospects of a US-led mission to an ice giant, and Olivier
Mousis from Toulouse to discuss giant planet origins and the French intentions
for future ESA proposals. Both of these
presentations were heavily biased towards Uranus, with good reason. As many of you will be aware, in 2010 Chris
Arridge led a team of European and American scientists in a bid for ESA’s
M3-class mission slot, with a concept called Uranus Pathfinder. The aim was to
show ESA that an ice giant mission captured all of the essential elements of
the Cosmic Vision, and that Europe could come up with viable strategies to
achieve these aims.
Mark Hofstadter reviewed the outcome of the US decadal and
budgetary cuts, starting with a Dickens quote – the best of times and the worst
of times, the best because a Uranus flagship was recognised as high priority,
and the worst because it doesn’t look likely any time soon. He discussed the prospects of Discovery and
New Frontiers Uranus missions, particularly with European involvement possibly
in the form of bilateral agreements and instrument builds. Chris Arridge reviewed the Uranus Pathfinder
concept, and our intentions to rework the design for the next L class round. Olivier
Mousis reviewed theories for the origins of Uranus and its satellite system,
providing observational tests to be addressed by in situ exploration (both
entry probes and INMS sampling from an orbiter). In particular, we talked about a revival of a
Saturn entry probe mission for the next ESA M-class call with a single
probe. Although this would target
Saturn, this would be equally beneficial to the Uranus Pathfinder community,
who saw an entry probe as a vital addition to address our questions about the
origins of the ice giants. Underpinning
all of this, we had a presentation by Richard Ambrosi from the University of
Leicester, part of a European consortium working towards efficient power
conversion technologies for the decay of Americium-241. Although the power density is only a quarter
that of plutonium-238, its being seen as a viable alternative, and the
consortium hopes to have a full-scale flight system in the near future.
The rest of the day was filled with review talks of key
science drivers for future exploration, including presentations on auroral
measurements from Juno and JWST from Tom Stallard of the University of
Leicester; a review of comparative ring science from Carl Murray of QMUL;
descriptions of future Titan exploration, such as TANDEM, TSSM, TiME and other
ideas from Mark Leese of the Open University; and mass spectrometry concepts
for future Titan landers, gas giant entry probes and penetrators for Europa,
Ganymede and Enceladus from Andrew Morse of the Open University.
Finally, we had two presentations reviewing the Jupiter Icy
Moons Explorer, which has been top of the European planetary science
community’s agenda for the past twelve months.
Michele Dougherty described the science case, with which I’m sure you’re
all familiar, and Matthew Stuttard from Astrium described a high level overview
of the company’s studies for the definition phase. Instrument proposals were
all submitted in mid-October during the DPS, and then selected back in February by ESA. The dust should hopefully settle over all of this in the next couple of
months, and the selected PI teams can begin to move forward with the JUICE
mission development.
In summary, we had a successful meeting reviewing the
scientific questions and key destinations for future exploration, and
discussions about collaborations on future ESA M and L-class calls for ice
giant missions and in situ exploration. Here's a link to the full text of the A&G article:
http://astrogeo.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/att032?ijkey=tCO9H18kEN76Ogr&keytype=ref
Disclaimer: Oxford Journals allow the author to include these links on their personal websites, or those of their host institutions, providing free access to the offprint to interested readers irrespective of whether you're a subscriber to A&G. The idea is that Oxford Journals can then track the readership of these articles via their own website.
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