Imagining A Mission to Jupiter's Ganymede with Planetary Science Summer School

Group shot - PSSS Session 1 - July 2010

The application deadline for the NASA Planetary Science Summer School at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California is approaching, and I realized that I hadn't yet written about my own PSSS experience six years ago. Rereading our paper and looking at photos just now, I remembered that I had met a few of my friends and colleagues through that experience. I present to you:

Ganymede Interior, Surface, and Magnetometer Orbiter, or, GISMO.

Planetary Science Summer School is a one-week bootcamp. Fourteen of us planetary science and engineering graduate students and post-docs gathered for the first session of PSSS in July 2010. We had been emailing back and forth for a month or so, throwing around ideas and getting to know each other. It was through these exchanges that we settled on our mission to Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon and the only moon known to have its own magnetosphere (magnetic field).

I was assigned the positions of Planetary Protection (protecting other worlds from us) and Education & Public Outreach (EPO). I was tasked with creating our protocols and objectives for protecting Ganymede and nearby worlds such as Europa from contamination and educating the public, especially students.

Protecting the solar system from us humans - July 2010

Additionally, I chose to be on the non-icy surfaces team and the instruments team. On the non-icy surface team, we focused and advocated for studying the interesting surface and subsurface features that Ganymede has to offer, that aren't ice. On the instruments team, we determined which sensors we'd need to carry in order to complete our science objectives. We had to make difficult choices when we didn't have enough money, didn't have enough data bandwidth downlink, didn't have enough power, or was too heavy to carry all that we wanted to fly.

What impressed me the most about the experience was how quickly we were able to design a planetary exploration mission to another world. With the help of experts from JPL's Team X, in just a week, we wrote a mission design paper and an hour-long presentation with technical details and budgets in line with a NASA New Frontiers program mission. The science objectives of the GISMO probe were to study:

• the magnetic field
• the interior
• the surface
• the atmosphere

All for approximately $710 million.

This was my first time at JPL, so I was glad we also got to see the sights. We got a tour of the Mars Exploration Rover mission (Spirit and Opportunity) facilities including rover mock-ups, testbeds, and the controls that give the rovers their schedule. We saw the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity in the clean room before it was launched. It was nice to roam the campus-like grounds, including spending time with the deer. We even saw a show at the Hollywood Bowl, BBC's Planet Earth with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Me with a Mars rover mock-up - July 2010

Mars rover testbed - July 2010

Curiosity on a test run in the JPL cleanroom before its stroll on Mars - July 2010

In addition to our NASA presentation that week, we also presented our paper at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Science Conference, the American Geophysical Union conference, and the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Aerospace conference. If there ever is a NASA mission to Ganymede in the future, I hope that the creators of that mission build upon what we started with GISMO.