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The small reconnaissance of atmospheres mission platform concept, part 1: motivations and outline for a swarm of scientific microprobes to the clouds of Jupiter in 2030

Published Online:January 20, 2015pp 327-344https://doi.org/10.1504/IJSPACESE.2014.066960

Abstract

A mission concept is presented for several small atmospheric entry vehicles at Jupiter. By relaxing the requirement for substantial penetration into the Jovian atmosphere, the size of the atmospheric entry probes shrinks dramatically. Such atmospheric entry probes would experience much less heating than previous concepts of much larger (~300kg) spacecraft presented as minimum concepts and no parachutes are necessary. This reduces complexity while still permitting over 15 minutes of useable science under free-fall from above the 0.41 bar level to near the 10 bar level of the Jovian Atmosphere during which up to 20 Mbits of data could be returned per probe. By dividing the payload, the risk to the mission is substantially mitigated and ground truth may be obtained from a large part of the entire planetary atmosphere using a single launch.

Keywords

mission concept, spacecraft design, planetary science, atmospheric science, Jupiter, microprobe

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