Large missions debated by ESA
14 Mar 2011 by Evoluted New Media
Although 2020 is almost a decade away, the European Space Agency is busy debating which large mission should be commissioned to push the boundaries of our knowledge.
Although 2020 is almost a decade away, the European Space Agency is busy debating which large mission should be commissioned to push the boundaries of our knowledge.
The choice is simple – the European Space Agency (ESA) have €700m to spend on one of three ventures: a 20m-long telescope that could see the very edge of a black hole; a trio of satellites which might be able to detect the ripples in space-time left by the moment of creation; or send a pair of spacecraft to visit Jupiter and two of its moons.
The first option – the International X-ray Observatory, or IXO – would be another grand telescope in the same vein as Hubble or Herschel. It aims to investigate the fundamental physical laws of the Universe, in particular how it originated and what it’s made of. Using advanced optics that could achieve sensitivity and resolution 10 to 100 times better than current state-of-the-art machines, it will probe black holes and matter under extreme conditions. It will look at the formation and evolution of galaxies, clusters and large scale structures as well as the life cycles of matter and energy.
“We think we’ve already seen some of these effects with the current generation of telescopes; evidence that time slows down close to a black hole. That causes light to shift. But even weirder things happen when you get to a black hole; you get effects that light is bent so that you can almost see the back of your head. That sort of thing can become observable if you’ve got enough sensitivity like you’ll have with IXO,” Paul Nandra from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics said.
LISA – the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna – is the second option and consists of three identical spacecraft each equipped with two telescopes with associated lasers and optical systems that act as an interferometer. The spacecraft will fly in near equilateral triangular formation separated by 5m km and trail behind the Earth at around 50m km in its orbit around the sun. Again it will probe the fundamental physical laws of the Universe and detect observational gravitational waves from astronomical sources in a frequency from 10-4 to 10-1 Hz.
The third option is the Europa Jupiter System Mission – also known as EJSM/Laplace. Two spacecraft will be sent out to Jupiter and its moons Europa and Ganymede to investigate the conditions for planet formation and the emergence of life.
“You need essential elements; you need water; you need stability over time; and you need energy as well,” Professor Michele Dougherty from Imperial College London said. “What we want to do is to try and understand the details of those four different areas.”
This endeavour would see NASA concentrate of Europa with one craft, and the Europeans investigate Ganymede with the other. The two would also work together to gather data from around the planet that would set Jupiter up as the archetype for all gas giants.
EJSM/Laplace isn’t the only mission that relies on international collaboration – NASA would also be involved in LISA and IXO, with the Japanese also participating in the latter. While the ESA are going through this selection process, NASA will be going through a similar one to select their preferred mission.
The process actually began several years ago in November 2007 when an internal assessment phase focused on the identification of key technology areas. By September 2009, the industrial assessment phase aimed to define the technology development plan, and this down selection process began in October 2010. The final decision will be announced in June this year.
