10 juni 2015

Beyond Mars: Robotic Exploration of the Outer Solar System Prof. Dr. Bert Vermeersen

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TU Delft Space Institute

December 9 2015: ESA and Airbus Defence & Space sign a 350 million euro contract to build the 5,500 kg Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE)

Eleven instrument suites are under development by scientific teams from Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, US and Japan, through corresponding national funding. The list of the 11 instruments:

• JANUS: Jovis, Amorum ac Natorum Undique Scrutator, camera system • MAJIS: Moons and Jupiter Imaging Spectrometer • UVS: UV Imaging Spectrograph • SWI: Sub-millimetre Wave Instrument • GALA: Ganymede Laser Altimeter (PI: H. Hussmann, DLR, Berlin; Co-I: TU Delft Space Institute) • RIME: Radar for Icy Moons Exploration • J-MAG: Magnetometer for JUICE • PEP: Particle Environment Package • RPWI: Radio & Plasma Wave Investigation • 3GM: Gravity & Geophysics of Jupiter and Galilean Moons • PRIDE: Planetary Radio Interferometry & Doppler Exp. (PI: L. Gurvits, JIVE & TU Delft Space Institute)

EXPERIMENTS UNDER DEVELOPMENT FOR JUICE

The JUpiter ICy moons Explorer mission, JUICE, will carry a suite of 11 scientific experiments to study the gas giant planet and its large ocean-bearing moons

On 12 November 2014, ESA's Rosetta mission soft-landed its Philae probe on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

On 14 July 2015, NASA's New Horizons mission flew closely by Pluto

(courtesy: NASA)

Dutch Legacy

1655 - Christiaan Huygens discovers Saturn moon Titan

350 Years Later…

14 januari 2005: Huygens Probe descending

on Saturn moon Titan

(courtesy: ESA)

(Courtesy: Geert Brouwer)

Diameter 5150 km

Surface temperature -180oC

Surface pressure 1.5 bar

Hazy atmosphere consisting of

95% nitrogen and 5% methane

(courtesy: NASA/JPL)

Titan

Distance Sun – Earth = 1 (Astronomical Unit) = 8.3 light minutes

Saturn moon Enceladus is very small (diameter of 500 km), still it looks smoothly round which indicates that the material in its interior must have rather low viscosities

Cassini images backlit by the sun show the fountain-like sources of the fine water ice spray contaminated with salts from the south polar region. Various discrete plumes of a variety of apparent sizes can be seen rising above the limb of this Saturnian moonlet.

Libration of

our Moon

Courtesy: Dan Brinkhuis / Science Media

Enceladus in a Cup of Espresso ?

Courtesy: Dan Brinkhuis / Science Media

• Observed in the laboratory

• Theoretically predicted to occur in the Earth’s seas & oceans, but not observed

yet on Earth despite many years of searching for them

• Might be of economic relevance:

Attractors of nutrients (and thus fish might concentrate

near these lines of attraction)

Attractors of ore deposits in the deep sea (part of

Dutch industrial innovation TOP SECTOR WATER)

Strange New Worlds: Natural Laboratories that Reveal New Physics

New Horizons: Convective Motions in Pluto Cassini: Tidally Induced Water Waves in Enceladus

Supported (~ 1 Meuro) by NSO/NWO Funding for PhD-projects @ DSI: ALW-GO/15-07: Identifying internal sources of evolving volcanic activity on Io (vacancy) ALW-GO/14-09: Internal Tides in the Oceans of Icy Moons (Sander van Oers) ALW-GO/12-11: Transient Rotational Variations of Icy Moons (Haiyang Hu) ALW-GO-PL/09-01: Rotational Variations of Icy Moons with Shallow Low-Viscosity Zones

(Hermes Jara-Orué)

ESA’s Jupiter

Icy Moons

Explorer JUICE .

Courtesy: ESA

Launch Window: 2022 – 2026 Arrival at Jupiter: 2030 – 2034

JUICE: Characterizing the Jovian System

• The Jupiter System serves as a

miniature solar system

• The Jupiter System is the archetype

for exoplanetary systems

• Exploring the emergence of habitable

worlds around gas giants

(ESA JUICE Yellowbook)

(ESA JUICE Yellowbook))

The Four Galilean moons of Jupiter

Io Europa Ganymede Callisto

Diameter 3643 km 3122 km 5262 km 4821 km

Mass 8,9 x 1022 kg 4,8 x 1022 kg 14,8 x 1022 kg 10,8 x 1022 kg

Orbit radius 421.700 km 671.034 km 1.070.412 km 1.882.709 km

Orbit period 1,77 days 3,55 days 7,15 days 16,69 days

Io, the innermost Galilean moon, is the most volcanically active solid body in the Solar System (images from Galileo mission, NASA/JPL)

(courtesy: NASA/JPL)

Cycloides: are unique features on Europa, indicating a water layer under the ice

Combination of both fault types is only possible if a sub-surface water layer is present

(H.M. Jara Orué & L.L.A. Vermeersen, Icarus, 215, 417-438, 2011)

Most likely the ocean in Jupiter’s

moon Europa alone already

contains more water than

Earth’s oceans ……….

(Courtesy: Leonid Gurvits)

Saved Huygens’ Doppler

Wind Experiment by

VLBI tracking directed

from EVN - Dwingeloo

Concept of PRIDE:

Planetary Radio Interferometry

and Doppler Experiment

Goal: precision of 20-30 m at Jupiter (Courtesy: Leonid Gurvits – JIVE, TUD)

Ultra-precise trajectory determination of

planetary missions to the outer planets,

extending traditional radio Doppler tracking

Ganymede Laser Altimeter GALA – derived from heritage of LRO and BELA laser

(ESA JUICE Yellowbook))

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) (Courtesy: GSFC; DLR; Dominic Dirkx)

Wettzell Laser Observatory

Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter

(LOLA)

Ground Tracks of JUICE for the two flybys

(ESA JUICE Yellowbook))

Water Geyser(s) at south pole of Europa ?

Hubble Space Telescope image,

released 12-12-2013

Reminiscent of Cassini

observations of Saturn moon

Enceladus

JUICE’s PEP instrument likely

can collect particles from such

geyers in the early 2030’s

(Courtesy: Hans Huybrighs,

TUD Space Institute MSc-

student @ Kiruna, Sweden)

Credit: Lorenz Roth,

Southwest Research Institute / USGS

ESA, 26 February 2015 Think of it as the ultimate hitchhiking opportunity: ESA is offering CubeSats a ride to a pair of asteroids in deep space. Teams of researchers and companies from any ESA Member State are free to compete. The selected CubeSats will become Europe’s first to travel beyond Earth orbit once the Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) is launched in October 2020. “AIM has room for a total of six CubeSat units,” explains Ian Carnelli, managing the mission for ESA.

CubeSats Offered Deep-Space Ride on ESA Asteroid Probe

Two TUD CubeSats in space

Delfi-C3

Delfi-n3Xt

SPEX is designed together with astronomy Leiden to measure flux & polarization of light reflected by atmospheres & surfaces. Polarization is very sensitive to particle

sizes & composition

Courtesy: Daphne Stam

SPEX: a unique, small & robust Spectropolarimeter for Planetary EXploration

TU Delft Chair on Planetary Exploration

Installed by the CvB of TU Delft on October 14 2014

“ To establish the trinity of interplanetary space missions, instrument development and solar system science applications in the Dutch academic landscape “

TU Delft Chair on Planetary Exploration

MSc 2015-2016

• Planetary Sciences 1, general core course for all Spaceflight

MSc students, taken by > 100 MSc-students in 2015-2016

• Planetary Sciences 2, specialized course, 20 – 30 MSc-

students expected, with project presentations at ESTEC

• 20 new MSc-students (and rising) doing their internships and

MSc-thesis work on interplanetary missions, instruments and

science applications at research institutes, universities, high-

tech enterprises and space agencies all over the world

• Miniaturisation, Instruments, Mission Design, Orbits & Tracking

• Distributed space systems (probes, cubesats, ROV’s)

• Surface & Sub-surface vehicles (rovers, boats, submarines, moles)

• Airborne vehicles for the atmospheres of Mars, Venus, Titan

Planetary Exploration is Highly Interdisciplinary

MarsFly & TitanFly

Aerostat with SPEX for Titan

Ice Mole for Mars & Europa (Bernd Dachwald, TH Köln)