Nasa is planning Europa and Pluto missions for the future, what other
missions would you want to see happening if you were calling the shots?
No specific scientific reason required, a simple "because it's there" will do.
I'm mainly talking about missions possible in the near future, so Alpha Centauri is excluded.

Mars of course has tons of places to go so I'll try something else:
My missions would be to the gas giants. I would want us to finally know for sure whether Jupiter has a core, and if so, how big is it and what it's made of. To accomplish this we would need a new probe to dive into Jupiter's atmosphere and it should have to have some sort of radar to
acquire the information mentioned above(how did we determine the composition of earth's core?) The same treatment would then be applied to Saturn. It would be cool to get pictures from the inside of both atmospheres.

As for Uranus and Neptune, since they're considered to have cores of liquid and ice and perharps even rock, couldn't we see a lander for both? Neptune's winds could prove a problem of course. No idea what the pressure would be on either surface, but a picture from Neptune's surface does have a nice ring to it.

What do you think? a Venus rover anyone?

First: Development of a launch system that would substantially reduce cost of tonnage to geostationary orbit.

Second: re-use of those large and roomy fuel tanks and put them into GS orbit.

Third: Anything to test VASIMR propulsion system, bolted on to the tanks.

Fill her up and go someplace

Well i can dream can't i?

AE35

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A tunabots swimming in Europa's ocean--> http://web.mit.edu/towtank/www/

A blimp, crab-like bots and entomopters on Titan

Entomopters on Mars--> http://avdil.gtri.gatech.edu/RCM/RCM...erProject.html

Self sustaining human colony on Mars by 2060 with at least a few people who won't be coming back because they don't have to.

A nice colony inside and on Phobos by 2080.

Several space elevators

Scramjet commercial flights

Large L1 space habitat by 2070

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Mad props for the topic.

My dream missions, in no particular order:

1.) A surface Venus multiprobe, with landers able to take MER-quality pictures (for at least as long as they survive) and surface composition studies.
2.) A Jupiter balloon probe.
3.) A Jupiter multiprobe, like Pioneer Venus.
4.) A Neptune orbiter.
5.) A Uranus orbiter (though a flyby would be better than nothing).
6.) Another Venus balloon probe or two.
7.) A Mars balloon probe.
8.) A Mars lander capable of doing radiometric dating of surface rocks.
9.) A Mars lander multiprobe specializing in meteorological studies.
10.) At least three, long-lived Mars seismometers to finally guage the internal structure and volcanic activity of Mars.
11.) A solar-escape solar sail mission, much like the proposed Interstellar Mission, to both test the technology and explore beyond the heliopause.
12.) A series of Mercury landers with seismometers. Actually, any Mercury lander would be cool. BepiColombo is still too touch-and-go for now...

Strictly speaking, NASA is not planning a Europa mission -- unless you are talking of a very far-off lander/hydrobot. JIMO is a Europa/Ganymede/Callisto mission and more to the point, it is getting less and less likely. Among other things, it is way too ambitious for a first use of a fundamentally new technology (space fission reactor). Somebody at NASA is already working on a proposal for a smaller demonstration mission; IIRC, it is supposed to be published in April. Which does not mean JIMO, or something like it, will not happen. It will happen later, and will be proven technology by that time.

Oh, I almost forgot. My dream mission? Deep Impact-style excavation on Saturn's moon Phoebe.

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I'm sorry, but if we ARE talking dream missions, than I would say an interstellar probe to Alpha Centauri is not out of the question.

Very high risk but the technology exists. I would say it is probably less ambitious than a Martian colony.

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If so then it's certainly a valid target. What technology are you referring to and how long would such a journey take?

Sun sail?
Ion engine?

By studying earthquakes, basically.

(Rotten timing for this explanation, but...) This is a highly oversimplified explanation, and I'm sure that someone will be able to fill in the gaps and correct me where needed.

Imagine a major earthquake in, say, Japan. Big enough that seismometers in the central US and eastern europe detect traces of it. (Yeah, they do propogate that far, but they're faint enough to require a seismometer to detect.) But not in western europe.

This suggests two things. 1) There is a solid core at the center of the earth blocking at least one of the three kinds of seismic waves. At least one that does not propogate through planetary scale solid. And 2) where the waves are detected and where they aren't gives a fair estimate as to the diameter of the core.

Compare that with the estimated mass of the earth (through the details of our orbit, someone else will have to fill you in on that), you have a fair idea of how dense the core must be. That density gives you a fair idea of what the core might be made of.

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I want Uranus and Neptune orbiters, on the same scale as Galileo and Cassini...

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A Alpha Centauri flyby, say a probe with a lightsail pushed by a big laser.
Probe+Laser= Weeeeeeeeee.....
I'd have it flyby and perhaps drop a probe off to flyby even closer.
Of course we'd need a big LEO booster, say the NuclearSpace liberty ship proposal.

Moose wrote:
Thanks!

the_shaggy_one wrote:
as do I, Voyager didn't even scratch the surface when it comes to Uranus
and Neptune certainly is worth another look.

I don't think the technology is there, some of the theory seems good but to let technology catch may take about 100 years for alpha Centauri

We are discussing dream missions also here: http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=18266

I want balloons in the Venus and the Mars air, I want a lander on Mars. Those are finally carrying instruments that can do biological tests (to allow at least the possibility to answer the question "is there life elsewhere" with a yes). Is that asked to much?

That's funny. I don't see anyone mentioning the moon here.
Isn't that were all the money is going the next 15 years or so?

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As far as dream missions are concerned, scratch a Neptune orbiter. It's already in the works, last I heard.

There was talk about 15 years ago that a rocket powered by a series of fusion explosions could achieve about 13% of the speed of light. That would get us to a. Centauri in about 25 years.

Or leave you with an exploded probe somewhere out in the orbit of Jupiter. As I said, high risk.

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A permanent orbital craft stationed at the ISS for Earth-Moon transfers. Doesn't have to be fancy, just has to work. Reuable engines with new fuel cells launched on a Proton, Atlas or Delta heavy booster (or two, or three)

A rugged, durable crew launch/return vehicle built around the concept that saving weight through use of hundreds of fragile tiles and brittle composite wing edges is probably not a bright idea.

Titan Exploration Rovers. Nuff said. Triton too. Its the best place to study cryovolcanism up close and personal. Just for grins, make'em nookyular. :P

Galileo/Cassini style missions to Uranus and Neptune. FYI, there's one in the works for Neptune, as I understand it, lets get'em all while we're on a roll.

Any spacecraft powered by an onboard nuclear reactor. Just to thumb your nose with the middle finger extended to the wackos who protest it.

A manned space shuttle mission to the Hubble. Stop being little girly men and even more girly little daddy's princesses and get that broken down heap of an orbiter back up there. The old nag's got some life left in it, make it work.

Pluto Express, complete with express delivery, MOVE IT!

Added: Just because I'm a mean cus with a wicked sense of humor. An Earth orbiter with a nuclear reactor on board SOLELY to power a BIG bright light so everyone on the ground can see it fly by, just so they can twitch and spasm when it flies by.

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I've heard that as well but I also seem to remember that it would take
some 300000(!) warheads to achieve it.

Simply for that objective, anything with nuclear goes.
I sincerely hope that Nasa will go forward with the suggestion to tackle
a comet with a nuke just to see what happens(don't remember which comet or how "offical" it is.) Just imagine the protests.

I would love to send a probe to a blackhole, but that won't happen there to far away(that a good thing though)

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The MAXIM mission sounds nice: an X-ray interferometer mission that can actually see black holes (actually their surroundings and how they bend light around them).

I'd like to see (among the already mentioned) a some sort asteroid probe that cruise within the asteroid belt studying great many asteroids (and similar probe to the Kuiper Belt too).

There are two major wave types: p-waves and s-waves. P-waves are longitudinal waves; you can think of this by imagining bunching up a Slinky and then letting it go. S-waves are tranverse; they're like shaking a Slinky up and down. Any major movement in the Earth's crust will generate both types of waves.

Both will travel through solid objects, but only p-waves will propogate through a liquid. While Earth does have a solid inner core, it's the liquid outer core that blocks s-waves. This creates a "shadow zone" where no s-waves will be detected from seismometers. There is also a smaller p-wave shadow zone that is created due to the refraction of p-waves at the boundaries of the solid mantle/liquid outer core. HOWEVER, there are some very weak p-waves detected within this second shadow zone, because the solid inner core reflects some of t