Beyond Mars: Robotic Exploration
of the Outer Solar System
Prof. Dr. Bert Vermeersen
TU Delft Space Institute
10 juni 2015
1
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)
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
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:
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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)
On 14 July 2015, NASA's New
Horizons mission flew closely by
Pluto
On 12 November 2014, ESA's
Rosetta mission soft-landed its
Philae probe on comet
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
(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)
Titan
Diameter 5150 km
Surface temperature -180oC
Surface pressure 1.5 bar
Hazy atmosphere consisting of
95% nitrogen and 5% methane
(courtesy: NASA/JPL)
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
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Observed in the laboratory
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Theoretically predicted to occur in the Earth’s seas & oceans, but not observed
yet on Earth despite many years of searching for them
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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
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Launch Window: 2022 – 2026
Arrival at Jupiter: 2030 – 2034
Courtesy: ESA
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
Diameter
Mass
Io
Europa
Ganymede
Callisto
3643 km
3122 km
5262 km
4821 km
14,8 x 1022 kg
10,8 x 1022 kg
671.034 km
1.070.412 km
1.882.709 km
3,55 days
7,15 days
16,69 days
8,9 x 1022 kg 4,8 x 1022 kg
Orbit radius 421.700 km
Orbit period
1,77 days
Io, the innermost Galilean moon, is the most volcanically active solid
body in the Solar System (images from Galileo mission, NASA/JPL)
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)
Cycloides: are unique
features on Europa,
indicating a water
layer under the
ice
(courtesy: NASA/JPL)
Most likely the ocean in Jupiter’s
moon Europa alone already
contains more water than
Earth’s oceans ……….
Saved Huygens’ Doppler
Wind Experiment by
VLBI tracking directed
from EVN - Dwingeloo
(Courtesy: Leonid Gurvits)
Ultra-precise trajectory determination of
planetary missions to the outer planets,
extending traditional radio Doppler tracking
Concept of PRIDE:
Planetary Radio Interferometry
and Doppler Experiment
Goal: precision of 20-30 m at Jupiter
(Courtesy: Leonid Gurvits – JIVE, TUD)
Ganymede Laser Altimeter GALA – derived from heritage of LRO and BELA laser
(ESA JUICE Yellowbook))
Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter
(LOLA)
Wettzell Laser Observatory
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO)
(Courtesy: GSFC; DLR; Dominic Dirkx)
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 MScstudent @ Kiruna, Sweden)
Credit: Lorenz Roth,
Southwest Research Institute / USGS
CubeSats Offered Deep-Space Ride on ESA Asteroid Probe
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.
Two TUD
CubeSats
in space
3
Delfi-C
Delfi-n3Xt
SPEX is designed together with
astronomy Leiden to measure flux &
polarization of light reflected by
atmospheres & surfaces.
SPEX: a unique, small & robust
Spectropolarimeter for
Planetary EXploration
Polarization is very sensitive to particle
sizes & composition
Courtesy: Daphne Stam
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 MScstudents 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, hightech enterprises and space agencies all over the world
Planetary Exploration is Highly Interdisciplinary
• 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
Ice Mole for Mars & Europa
(Bernd Dachwald, TH Köln)
MarsFly & TitanFly
Aerostat with SPEX for Titan