Seems to me that one of the nobler things this list group could
do is find some way to pressure NASA and Congress to keep JIMO alive
*and relevant* by adding some of those science payloads that could
make a difference in discovery, like ice penetrators or a soft
lander. If NASA could produce a Cassini-Huygens payload, it
could do something similar for the even closer Jupiter-Europa system.
A JIMO orbiter is just more of the same, and will likely end up as
Jeff Bell predicts.
Let's all hope Jeff gets this one wrong.
Gary
A friend who talked to members of two of the competing industry design teams for this spacecraft tells me that they independently concluded many months ago that the mission is impractical.
Possibly this explains why it was another team that was recently selected by NASA to actually build the JIMO spacecraft.
What better way to get the monkey off your back than to slack off and deliver a technically weak or poorly budgeted proposal, that's certain to be rejected?
The main problem with JIMO seems to be poor communication between the hostile cultures of space scientists and space engineers. This mission has been in concept development for many years under many names. During all this time, it was obvious to every scientist involved that the mapping orbits around the target moons had to be polar orbits.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-04zh.html
