ESA Science & Technology - Publication Archive
Publication archive
Publication archive
JWST will play a central role, along with other new capabilities such as Herschel, ALMA, and large groundbased telescopes, in advancing our understanding of the four key questions:
- How do interstellar clouds of gas and dust begin their collapse into stars?
- What processes regulate the star formation following this collapse?
- How do planets form in dense disks of gas and dust around young stars?
- What is the subsequent evolution of planetary systems?
- to assess the feasibility of the proposed mission
- to prepare for the future competitive industrial assessment studies by identifying critical issues that need addressing at higher priority
- to provide the building blocks and feed-back for further interaction with the science team for formulation of feasible mission goals.
To this end, the CDF study established bottom-up designs for three elements: a montgolfière, a long-lived lander (powered by an ASRG), and a minimum sized small lander of limited lifetime (powered by battery).
This report describes the design of the chosen baseline after the first technical iteration and incuding an updated mission profile providing enhanced mass capability of the delivery of the in situ elements, after the addition of a solar electric propulsion stage of the NASA orbiter.
This report is the result of an independent ESA internal assessment study.
JEO is the NASA Element of the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM).
The objective of this study, to assess the science merit, technical risk and qualitative assessment of relative cost of alternative architectural implementations as applied to a first dedicated mission to Europa, was accomplished by 1) reviewing results from previous and current studies and 2) examining alternative architectural options relative to the science objectives defined by the 2007 EE SDT. This report summarizes a number of Europa mission and system concepts studied over the last decade as well as the results from assessing alternative architectural options in light of current science requirements.