Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
magnetospheres, cosmochemistry, and small bodies in the AOGS scientific
community. And the Saturnian system will be the place to go after the
young generation of Asian space scientists has moved from the Moon to
Mars, and to Jupiter in cooperation with their colleagues in Europe and
America.
Galileo said that the Galilean satellite system appeared to be another
solar system for him. The same thing can be said of the Saturnian satellite
system.
To study these wonderful gifts and creations from Nature — as in the
case of our Earth — would take time and patience. It would take many dif-
ferent missions and possibly many generations before human could finally
understand the origin, evolution, and structures of the Solar system and
the planetary satellite systems in it. What we have sketched here is mainly
to size up the different options which are important to address different
major scientific issues. Some of these (i.e., the ring hopper) are clearly
very demanding in technical terms and would require advance technol-
ogy such as nuclear propulsion systems still to be developed. And some
emerging hot topics like Enceladus and Iapetus are so new that, very little
can be said about it — except for amazement — at the present moment.
It is our belief that future discussions will clarify this situation. In this
spirit, we use Table 1 to summarize the mission elements which would play
essential roles in the next generation of space exploration of the Saturnian
system.
In Table 1, we have divided six mission elements into three sets. The
idea is to show that, realistically speaking, a multi-mission approach would
be necessary if we want to carry out all desired scientific investigations.
Depending on the technological readiness, financial constraints, and focused
scientific goals, we could envisage the combinations of the mission elements
into two to three integrated projects. For example, we could have the
combinations of (A,B = Saturn Atmosphere Probe plus Titan Orbiter),
(A',B' = Polar Orbiter and Microwave Sounder plus Enceladus Lander),
and (C,C' = Phoebe Rover plus Iapetus Rover) or the combinations of
(A,B'), (A',B), and (C,C') with the ring hopper (D = Ring Hopper) as a
wild card. The main point is to allow for the coverage of as broad a spec-
trum of scientific interests as possible. We might be criticized as being too
idealistic and optimistic in proposing such an endeavor which will require
pooling of all scientific resources of Asia, Europe, and Americas in the next
20 some years. To answer this, we must return to the statements made in
Sec. 1 projecting the Asian economy and science to be comparable to those
