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Planetary News: Europa (2005)European Scientists Convene to Chart ESA's Future MissionsBy A.J.S. RaylApril 22, 2005 More than 150 scientists representing all of the member states in the European Space Agency (ESA) are convening in the Netherlands this week for a symposium to develop 'roadmaps' that will chart the course for Europe's space exploration 15 to 20 years from now. The topics and projects under discussion this week include astronomical missions to investigate black holes, gravity waves, and dark energy, and planetary missions that would dispatch life-sniffing rovers to Mars and a spacecraft to checkout Europa, sample return missions to and from Mars and a near Earth object, and a solar sail to interstellar space. "When I first started working in Europe there was a belief -- a rumor? -- certainly a myth -- that Europe couldn't do planetary science -- it was too expensive," ESA Science Director David Southwood recalled at the pre-symposium press conference Tuesday. "Well, we have arrived." Indeed, in recent years, the European Union (EU) has rocketed into space exploration with a string of impressive successes, most recently Mars Express -- which has confirmed the presence of water on Mars, detected methane and perhaps formaldehyde in the atmosphere, possible signs of life, and returned hundreds of astounding images of the planet's surface; SMART 1 -- which made it to the Moon late last year; and the Huygens probe -- which separated from Cassini, survived entry, descent and landing to send home data about the shrouded, never-before-explored Titan. As a result, the EU has positioned itself as a visible and potent force in exploration of the Final Frontier, and ESA officials at the press briefing seemed confident the agency would be expanding its presence. Although two more planetary missions are on ESA's manifest this decade -- Venus Express, and BepiColombo, the agency's cornerstone mission to Mercury, the least explored planet in the inner Solar System -- it is now focusing the spotlight on astronomy missions. "Our tight budget has forced us to try to do things in different ways," Southwood told The Planetary Society in an interview earlier this year. "From a technical approach, Mars Express was riding on Rosetta, and Venus Express rides on Mars Express. There has been a burst of planetary activity and [now] the agency will switch back for a few years to astronomy, where again we'll use the same kind of synergistic approach." In the next decade, ESA will launch a half dozen far-reaching astronomy investigations, including:
"As exciting as planetary exploration is, without astronomical investigations of planets elsewhere -- the chemistry of the formation of stars and planets, etcetera, it doesn't make sense," Southwood pointed out. "The only way I can do it efficiently [within budget constraints] is to allow the planetary people to take the center stage for a few years, and then allow the astronomers to move to center stage for awhile." If everything goes as planned, however, and the member states of ESA pony up the financial and technical support needed, ESA may not have to skip too many planetary beats before it returns to landing on another hard surface. On the agenda and under development is the first mission of the Aurora program -- a long-term project for robotic and human exploration of solar system bodies holding promises for traces of life, and potentially leading to human missions to Mars circa 2033. Earlier this month, European space scientists gathered at an international space workshop hosted by the UK's Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council [PPARC] and held in Birmingham, England to debate robotic missions up to 2013, the first phase of the Aurora program. The scientists strongly recommended a rover mission to Mars to be launched by a Soyuz-Fregat 2b rocket in June 2011 from ESA's spaceport at Kourou in French Guiana, with the rover to arrive on the surface of Mars in June 2013. It will then begin conducting a detailed analysis of the environment, including measuring Marsquakes and other seismic phenomena, and search for life -- past or present. The scientists considered three candidate missions: BeagleNet, ExoMars and its variant ExoMars-Lite. If they can get Aurora on the runway, ESA won't suffer from what Southwood calls the "the swings-and-roundabouts approach" where the agency if forced to swing from planets back to astronomy and then back to planets out of financial necessity. A detailed proposal on this Aurora rover mission to Mars will be prepared for consideration by ESA member states at the agency's Council Meeting at Ministerial Level in December 2005. At that same meeting, the Ministers will also be presented with the basic roadmap of missions and projects that emanate from the symposium at the European Space Research and Technology center in Noordwijk this week. Dubbed Cosmic Vision 2020, this future agenda will project and recommend missions from 2015 to 2025. ESA has issued a second call for proposals that will meet the objectives and goals of four main themes that the agency settled on at a workshop held in Paris last September. At the press conference, Giovanni Bignami, Chair of ESA's Space Science Advisory Committee, presented the main themes:
A "bird's eye view of what [ESA] has in stock," as Bignami put it, actually covered a lot of exploration territory, and included: planetary missions to Mars, Jupiter, Europa, Titan, and some Near Earth objects (NEOs); physics investigations to probe the grand unified theory, gravitational waves, and high energies; astronomy / cosmology studies to learn more about the early Universe and its probable evolution in the future, star formation, imaging of protoplanetary discs, terrestrial planets, and research clusters of galaxies back to their formation epoch, and mergers of supermassive black holes. While the member countries obviously have not yet budgeted for these missions nor will the Ministers be asked to approve budgets come December, the purpose of the symposium and presentation is to set ESA's course for the longer-term. "What we're doing is establishing the future boundary condition," Southwood said. "The Ministers next December [will be] there to decide the level of results over the next four years -- '07 to 2010 -- but they're going to feel much better in giving us a solid budget if we have our act together and we're well-projected after the decade now ongoing. "Basically the message to the Ministers is that European imaginations have yet to be controlled by them and brought down to size," Southwood continued. "When, for the third time in 20 years, we've gone out to ask for ideas and we got three times as many people responding as in 1985, there is a message all its own -- that Europe really is going to the stars, and that the ministers have to realize that a society that stops looking outwards if a society that isn't going to be sustainable. The Ministers have to be concerned with more than budget. These are ministers of science, technology and sometime education. Frankly, they have to take longer views [because they] have a long-term responsibility to their countries, as well as a short-term. And we have to tell them what lies in the future our job because we know and they don't." The ESA officials used the occasion of the press conference to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), a joint project with NASA, and a milestone for the European agency. The school bus sized telescope was launched into orbit by the Space Shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. Asked if ESA had opined for a Hubble servicing mission to keep the telescope operational longer, Southwood said: "We don't have a budget to bring to the table to influence [that] and we never did in the past. The [space] shuttle is built by the US and is operated by the US and we are very pleased to take part in the program and grateful to the Americans for the cooperation they've shown, but it's the Americans that decide the priorities on their space transportation system. We'll go on cooperating as long as Americans have a Hubble Space Telescope, but I certainly don't lecture them about a space transportation system that that are theirs and not mine." The Hubble if not serviced will effectively stop delivering images sometime next year. The public outcry against not servicing the Hubble has offered a glimmer of hope for continued operations, but whether or not NASA will pull the plug, as the agency has indicated it will, remains to be seen. Duccio Macchetto, head of ESA's space telescope division, seemed to take it in stride as he reviewed the accomplishments of what some people call "the greatest telescope ever built," illustrating his chronicle with more than a dozen glorious images. At the end, he summed up ESA's experience with Hubble and the agency's path on the Frontier ahead by reflecting on the wisdom of Albert Einstein in a way that seems to speak to the Europeans' sense of passion and commitment to exploration -- "Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow . . . The important thing is to not stop questioning." |
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