
All Systems Go for NASA's Mission to Jupiter Moon Europa - Thorondor
http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/all-systems-go-for-nasas-mission-to-jupiter-moon-europa
======
GrantS
The most interesting bit to me was learning why the mission involves orbiting
Jupiter rather than orbiting Europa directly. Though the text doesn't make it
clear, the video explains (starting at 0:59) that directly orbiting Europa
would mean too much time spent in the most intense parts of Jupiter's
radiation belts. Making 45 Europa fly-bys apparently avoids radiation-related
issues and allows for making observations over an extended period of time to
detect changes.

EDIT: The Wikipedia article on Jupiter's Magnetosphere [1] has great details
on the impact of Jupiter's radiation on previous missions. For example,
Pioneer 11 lost most of its images of Io, and Galileo had total data loss on
three of its orbits.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere_of_Jupiter#Explo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere_of_Jupiter#Exploration_after_1970)

~~~
nickmccann
Does anyone know how this radiation affects the chance of life on the moon?

~~~
stephengillie
Do we have any information on the magnetosphere of Europa? I wonder how much
protection it's providing, if any?

For comparison, Venus and Mars have magnetospheres that are smaller than their
atmospheres, allowing the solar wind to blow away lighter molecules, such as
water. Earth, by contrast, has a magnetosphere that's much larger, and
provides significant protection.

~~~
CamperBob2
phyugin, your comment is marked [dead] for some reason.

------
drzaiusapelord
This is great news. I can't wait for this mission.

> If proven to exist, this global ocean could hold more than twice as much
> water as Earth.

I really wish we were past the "is there water there" stage and onto the "Lets
drop a submarine and see what's down there" stage. I imagine getting through
15 miles of ice might be a wee challenging.

~~~
jdhawk
I know there is a very good reason for this, but it seems like we're sending a
lot of satellites to these moons and planets to perform VERY similar missions.
Orbit around, take photos and readings.

Why are we creating a new spacecraft every time this happens? Why are they not
"mass producing" the same generic exploration sat, with a generally useful set
of features, then slightly modifying it for any specifics?

Launch in 2020's? snooze. Just launch the same sat from the last mission and
start getting data now.

~~~
avian
Different missions require vastly different hardware.

> Orbit around,

Orbiting Europa requires a different amount of propellant than orbiting Mars.
Solar panels that power a probe at Mars won't power one farther away from the
sun. Radio that can talk with Earth from the Mars orbit won't be able to do
that from Jupiter.

> take photos and

Different cameras required due to different amount of light, expected
distances for imaging, filters optimized for materials being imaged, etc.

> readings.

What readings? Basically no two probes carry the same set of scientific
instruments. Often, the instruments carried are one-of-a-kind, specifically
designed for the specific thing the mission wants to investigate.

~~~
anigbrowl
_Basically no two probes carry the same set of scientific instruments._

That's the problem. Great as those are, by continually making one- or two-of-
a-kind devices we are endlessly prototyping. What if we picked one or a few
different designs, selecting for greatest generality, and then worked to get
the costs very low by manufacturing a lot of them, _accepting_ that they will
be suboptimal for almost every target?

Of course crappy probes would give crappy results, and many of them would fail
altogether. But what if we deployed _hundreds_ of cheap crappy probes on a
regular basis - ie build a shotgun instead of a series of sniper rifles?
Obviously finding a good general-purpose design is easier said than done.

We have I think 3 lunar probes in orbit at the moment, and a few more on the
way, as well as various probes that have gone to the moon, sent back a bit of
data, and then crashed into it by design. That's not very many at all. The
moon's not that far away, why not try putting 50 low-cost probes around it
with the same instrumentation and see what we learn from that? If we can get
better astronomical observations from arrays of relatively low-power
telescopes, surely we will get better planetary observational data from arrays
of low-quality probes? Simply getting an array of probes up there and running
and learning hwo to handle the networking, data flow, and and the inevitable
variety of unexpected failure modes will provide us with a vast amount of
experience, not to mention a vast amount of additional data about the moon
that can be benchmarked against a whole lot of excellent data we have already
for accuracy.

I don't mean this as a dig at you or the other commenters critiquing this
proposal, but you remind me of Thomas J Watson suggesting that "I think there
is a world market for maybe five computers" (not withstanding the apocryphal
nature of this quote, similar sentiments were expressed by other experts
around that period, eg
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_misquo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_misquote)).

~~~
srdev
You're ignoring the lifting costs. The cost of lifting a payload into space
and putting it into orbit is non-trivial compared to the cost of developing
the probe. Can you imagine the cost of trying to put 50 probes into Julian
orbit? Or even Lunar orbit? It would be cost-prohibitive. It gets worse if you
use a bunch of mass-produced designs because you'd have a bunch of instruments
of marginal value to the mission increasing lifting costs.

I also think you're assuming its possible to reduce to a general set of
equipment that can answer the scientific questions that we're trying to
answer. If you consider, for example, the difference between the things that
Philae, Curiosity, New Horizons, Dawn, and this Europa probe are testing and
the conditions that they are testing them in, then its hard to arrive at a
common design that can handle all these conditions.

Edit: Another thing to consider is launch windows. You typically don't want to
just regularly launch stuff to put near Mars or Jupiter whenever. You time
your launches such that you can get them there within a certain amount of dV
budget, otherwise you're dramatically increasing your deployment costs. This
means that you only have a short window in which you can send out your shotgun
probes -- you can't send them out constantly even if the lifting costs were
feasible.

~~~
anigbrowl
Let's focus on the lunar orbit idea as a relatively straightforward objective,
since it is practically in our backyard and we have so much experience there.

I am not suggesting we perform 50 different launches into space. That would be
hopelessly wasteful. But suppose we did one launch, sent one ship towards the
moon, and then have it release 50 probes as it got close, each with a small
amount of propellant sufficient get itself into orbit.

I am _not_ suggesting a common design that is adequate to handle all the
different conditions of the different missions you mention. I said
specifically that we should focus some effort on developing cheap probes,
accepting that they will be suboptimal in almost every case.

Let's consider one of the most basic things we like to do, which is to simply
take pictures of things. Pictures help sell science to the public because most
people are interested in how things look, and they are scientifically useful.
When we aggregate multiple pictures of the same subject we often get even more
useful scientific data. Downsides, the data transmission requirements are
large and visual spectrum is just a small slice of the information we'd like
to collect. Upsides, you can buy a COTS camera that takes 4k video or ~50mp
stills for a few thousand $. Likewise you can buy a fast lens of high optical
quality very cheaply, and record onto very cheap solid-state media. Let's
accept that it will fail in some situations and that we don't expect it to
keep working for ever, but we would like it to work for a while. so we need
some power (onboard or renewable or some combination of the two), an antenna
of some sort to transmit the data back and listen to requests from our end,
some shielding to protect it against the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune, some sort of propulsion to get it into position and point it roughly
where we want it to look, and a little control system to run it all.

Technologically this is no longer a tall order. We can stick a consumer video
camera & phone in a lunchbox, attach it to a balloon, send it up to the
stratosphere, and retrieve it afterwards for only hundreds of dollars, it's a
middle-school project by now. I think that we could make a pretty decent
camera probe that would take relatively high resolution pictures at a
relatively low frame rate and last for at least a year for a marginal cost of
$100,000, maybe quite a bit less. 50 of those would be $5 million, which is
the sort of sum you can raise on Kickstarter. Now, the fixed costs of launch,
building a deployment module and numerous other things would be a lot higher,
let's say they started at $50 million. Well, that's quite a lot of money but
you could still raise it pretty easily. Donald Trump plans to waste twice that
amount on promoting himself as a public figure while pretending he wants to be
President, a summer blockbuster movie has launch costs of about $200m
including marketing. There are lots of people in Silicon Valley who could
write checks for that whole amount if they really wanted to. I pick $50
million as a benchmark because India managed to get a probe going around Mars
for ~$75 million, so I don't think it's a totally outrageous idea to think we
could deploy a bunch of lunar microsatellites for 2/3 of that.

OK, let's say we even went overbudget by a factor 2 but we managed to do it.
We have 50 probes in lunar orbit sending back, i dunno, 43 4k photographs of
the lunar surface at the rate of 1 frame/minute (7 of them failed to deploy
properly). None of them works properly for longer than 18 months. Within a few
years they have all fallen out of orbit and are space junk on the lunar
surface. Well, I think that we'd get a _ton_ of useful knowledge from doing
that.

~~~
jallmann
Again: what would be the benefit of collecting hundreds of mediocre (and
probably predictable after the first few samples) data points, without being
able to do the kind of science you _really_ want to do?

If we had a few things we knew we wanted to monitor for a long time, then this
sort of proposal might make sense. But we don't, and there are always new
questions to be answered, necessitating the use of different instruments on
different missions. Those are rarely as simple as a camera simply taking
pictures.

Moreover, I think you are overestimating the reliability of COTS hardware and
underestimating the environment in space -- or underestimating the cost of
radiation hardened hardware while overestimating its capabilities. You don't
just grab a SD card or a CCD and send it into space. Likewise with
lenses/filters (we are more interested in some wavelengths than others), etc.

COTS hardware may work for cute balloon projects that stay within the Earth's
atmosphere, or (maybe!) satellites in low earth orbit. Space is a very
different environment.

Even with "economies of scale" pushing down the cost per probe, you still have
substantial fixed operational and science costs on top of that. Since running
a large fleet of probes would be, overall, more complex than a single probe,
I'm not sure if it would even be cheaper to operate than a few specialized
probes. So you get worse science for, at _best_ , the same cost, with much
increased operational complexity. Again: what is the benefit?

~~~
anigbrowl
I've already explained what the benefits are: practice, because we are going
to want to run networks in space sooner or later anyway; the observational
benefits from aggregating an array of relatively low-quality observations,
which is something we _already do_ for astronomy; and knowledge of failure
modes and fault tolerances.

I _don 't_ expect COTS stuff to work that well or that long. But I would like
to know how well or poorly it does perform. Some kinds of hardware are so
cheap that we can afford to waste it on such experiments. Your reference to
'science costs' suggests to me that you've missed the point; I don't want to
do any innovative science, I am perfectly happy to try something as simple as
taking boring pictures to begin with as proof of concept, so we can
concentrate on operational issues. Learning how to do things fast and cheaply
even if the results are not especially good is a perfectly worthwhile goal in
its own right.

~~~
jallmann
> benefits are: practice, because we are going to want to run networks in
> space sooner or later anyway

As I've said earlier, learning how to manage a fleet of probes is a non-issue
until we actually have a legitimate need for a large fleet of probes operating
in concert, which won't be for a (very) long time. Note that we already have
experience managing satellite constellations in the 50+ range.

> I don't expect COTS stuff to work that well or that long. But I would like
> to know how well or poorly it does perform. Some kinds of hardware are so
> cheap that we can afford to waste it on such experiments

TBH, neither do I, but 1) Someone does already, hence why we don't hear about
Nikons on interplanetary missions, or even in orbit. 2) We don't need to send
dozens of probes up to space to find out. In fact, we don't even need to leave
the Earth. 3) Many instruments are not simply cameras, let alone COTS.

> Your reference to 'science costs' suggests to me that you've missed the
> point

You are moving the goal posts, your original comment was about sending dozens
of cheap probes up to do different missions. Quoting:

> What if we picked one or a few different designs, selecting for greatest
> generality, and then worked to get the costs very low by manufacturing a lot
> of them, accepting that they will be suboptimal for almost every target?

Even taking your statement that this isn't meant to be good science, beyond
the perceived benefits of increased operational experience after the first few
batches of probes (using the moon as your example), continuing with the
"small, cheap, lousy" form factor is not going to outweigh the loss of
spending the money instead on fewer solid science missions -- because, _right
now_ , what other purpose do we have for sending probes into space? We don't
have the resources or knowledge to do anything else "useful" yet -- the
science needs to come first. srdev has made better arguments on why it's still
infeasible from a cost and technical perspective.

~~~
anigbrowl
I am not moving the goalposts at all. I made a general point about what I'd
like to happen I wrote an entire post addressing a single example of an
initial project with the specific goal of doing nothing more exotic than
taking pictures of the moon, our nearest neighbor to see what would be
achievable at a low cost. I made it very clear from the outset that I wanted
ot explore theidea of leveraging quantity and low cost at the expense of
quality and speficity. To claim otherwise is not an honest way to carry on an
argument.

Feel free to keep right on arguing about why this is stupid and a waste of
time until someone gets around to doing it, which I predict will happen
between 2025 and 2030.

~~~
waterlesscloud
"Feel free to keep right on arguing about why this is stupid and a waste of
time until someone gets around to doing it"

This is something HN does a lot. Always mystifies me, for a site based around
a supposedly disruptive startup industry. Lots of little mental boxes in many
of the conversations.

EDIT- To be fair, the reason your proposal hasn't happened yet is that it's
still very early days for space exploration. Satellites in Earth orbit are
often like you describe, so contrary to some of the arguments against it,
obviously it _can_ be done. But even though we have countless photos of
Jupiter, it's a lot more mysterious that it seems. So much still totally
unknown, so they have to optimize for learning it all. Your approach is
actually pretty good for refining general knowledge once the basics are locked
in. As such, you're very likely correct that the Moon will be a target of such
efforts soon.

------
skeuomorf
hmm, let's hope it turns out better this time
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2051879/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2051879/)

------
jafaku
If you want to get hyped, I recommend the movie Europa Report.

~~~
JonnieCache
Seconded. A great little film.

------
ecolak
No lander?? :-(

------
dredmorbius
June 17, 2015

15-130

All Systems Go for NASA's Mission to Jupiter Moon Europa

Could a liquid water ocean beneath the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa have
the ingredients to support life? Here's how NASA's mission to Europa would
find out.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech Beyond Earth, Jupiter’s moon Europa is considered
one of the most promising places in the solar system to search for signs of
present-day life, and a new NASA mission to explore this potential is moving
forward from concept review to development.

NASA’s mission concept -- to conduct a detailed survey of Europa and
investigate its habitability -- has successfully completed its first major
review by the agency and now is entering the development phase known as
formulation.

“Today we’re taking an exciting step from concept to mission, in our quest to
find signs of life beyond Earth,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator
for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Observations of Europa
have provided us with tantalizing clues over the last two decades, and the
time has come to seek answers to one of humanity’s most profound questions.”

NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter in the late 1990s produced strong evidence
that Europa, about the size of Earth’s moon, has an ocean beneath its frozen
crust. If proven to exist, this global ocean could hold more than twice as
much water as Earth. With abundant salt water, a rocky sea floor, and the
energy and chemistry provided by tidal heating, Europa may have the
ingredients needed to support simple organisms.

The mission plan calls for a spacecraft to be launched to Jupiter in the
2020s, arriving in the distant planet’s orbit after a journey of several
years. The spacecraft would orbit the giant planet about every two weeks,
providing many opportunities for close flybys of Europa. The mission plan
includes 45 flybys, during which the spacecraft would image the moon's icy
surface at high resolution and investigate its composition and the structure
of its interior and icy shell.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, has been
assigned the responsibility of managing the project. JPL has been studying the
multiple-flyby mission concept, in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins
University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, since 2011.

Instruments selected for the Europa mission's scientific payload were
announced by NASA on May 26. Institutions supplying instruments include APL;
JPL; Arizona State University, Tempe; the University of Texas at Austin;
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio and the University of Colorado,
Boulder.

“It’s a great day for science,” said Joan Salute, Europa program executive at
NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We are thrilled to pass the first major
milestone in the lifecycle of a mission that will ultimately inform us on the
habitability of Europa.”

NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington conducts a wide variety of
research and scientific exploration programs for Earth studies, space weather,
the solar system and the universe.

For more information about NASA's mission to Europa, visit:

[http://www.nasa.gov/europa](http://www.nasa.gov/europa)

-end-

Dwayne Brown / Laurie Cantillo

Headquarters, Washington

202-358-1726 / 202-358-1077

dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov / laura.l.cantillo@nasa.gov

Elizabeth Landau / Preston Dyches

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-354-6425/818-354-7013

elizabeth.r.landau@jpl.nasa.gov / preston.dyches@jpl.nasa.gov

Last Updated: June 18, 2015

Editor: Sarah Ramsey

(For those on older / non-JS browsers)

------
anon3_
What programming languages / operating systems do these systems use?

Is there any chance they could be open sourced?

Why is the hardware on them so weak? Why is the bandwidth so low?

Why can't we just spend a billion dollars for more bandwidth, CPU power and
hard drive space? Why don't we just build an army of orbiters and send them
into space?

~~~
dm2
[https://github.com/nasa](https://github.com/nasa) and
[http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/opensource/](http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/opensource/) and
[https://code.nasa.gov/](https://code.nasa.gov/)

Hardware has to be radiation hardened and redundant.

Bandwidth is so low because it has to send radio waves 500 million miles, and
that's not an exaggerated number.

[https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html](https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html)

Edit: The Deep Space Network is currently down, might be aliens, good luck
everybody.

~~~
anon3_
We have billions of dollars. USA already is experts at making complex,
reliable and complicated hardware with complex manufacturing processes.

Why can't we just craft that hardware we need in bulk? We have billions of
dollars in funding. Make a factory production out of it.

Why don't we send 300 mars rovers? We can make 5000 tanks. We can build 5000
fighter jets. Why do we just build _one_ rover?

My impression with astronomy is it has nowhere near the fervor or seriousness
that defense has. Why are we not dumping supply ships in the moon in
anticipation of colonization?

~~~
dm2
I wrote a very detailed reply for this with lots of sources, but deleted it
because it would only invite more questions that you can find out the answers
to yourself. Really what you are asking requires several books worth of
information to fully explain.

Basically just read everything on Wikipedia about DARPA, NASA, CIA satellites,
the NRO, the Apollo missions, Sputnik, Voyager 1 / 2, the Curiosity rovers,
KH-9, KH-11, Hubble, etc. then come back and criticize NASA if you still think
that they are not doing their job properly.

You have the answers to all of these questions and more at your fingertips via
Google.

NASA has another Curiosity rover, but the cost/benefit of sending it to Mars
isn't worth it in their expert opinions.

------
dredmorbius
This web site optimized for ... arguing with users.

Nondismissable "upgrade your browser" dialog. Which, of course, I can't
actually do.

I thought we learned this was a bad thing in the 1990s.

[http://www.htmlhelp.com/feature/art2.htm](http://www.htmlhelp.com/feature/art2.htm)

