Of Europa, Titan, Enceladus, and Delta IV Heavy

Europa, Titan, and Enceladus are all interesting in their own way. Europa, a moon of Jupiter, may have a sub surface ocean of liquid water. Liquid water is essential for life on earth, so there is possibility of life on Europa. See also Europa Revealed. Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, has a thick hazy nitrogen atmosphere that is unique among all satellites. What we see now on Titan is similar to the conditions on Earth eons and eons ago. See also Titan. More recently, water vapor has been discovered emerging from the south pole of Enceladus, another moon of Saturn. That means this moon may have reservoirs of liquid water.

Why is Europa the priority? I'd say it's because

1. it's closer,
2. we currently don't have any spacecraft at Jupiter, while we still have Cassini at Saturn, and
3. we're ready to go to Europa, while we still have much to scout out at Titan and Enceladus using Cassini before we can plan more focused missions to those places.

Just noticed a new document at the OPAG website.

After some digging a few weeks back, I finally found out about the next flight for the Delta IV Heavy. It'll be in late January of 2007 from Cape Canaveral. That will be the second flight of the Delta IV Heavy and the first after a propellant cavitation problem was found on the maiden flight of the Delta IV Heavy in December 2004. They've applied the fix to the Delta IV line of rockets and let's hope next January's launch of the Delta IV Heavy will be a complete success.

Now back to Europa. Remember ESA's plan to Europa in my last post? What I'm thinking is to have NASA fly the Europa Orbiter while ESA fly the relay craft at Jupiter orbit. This way, we can save some weight on the communications system on the Europa Orbiter and maybe use it for science instruments.