CC, don't worry too much about the self-advertisement. If you find something cool, and you think people here might be interested, it never hurts to submit the story. For example, I submitted the story about the Titan playas, though it wasn't approved, probably because I submitted it to the wrong place.

No, torrents are a communist plot to destroy Hollywood. Didn't you know that?

Does he really want people to answer that? His card says that he's a douche and is full of himself. His card says that he wasted 25 years of his life working on an effective business card, rather than doing something productive, like watching grass grow. His card says that he has too much money and should be personally taxed more. His card says that he doesn't care about the earth because of all the 4 dollar, nice card stock business cards that will be thrown out after people mutter, "what a douche," after he hands him that (or they just file the info in some sort of electronic address book thingie.

What ever happened to "faster, better, cheaper"??

Mars Polar Lander happened. If you actually want to perform comprehensive science at these targets, you actually need to spend money.

In other words, you can have two out of three of "faster, better, cheaper", but not all three at the same time.

An orbiter is needed before you send a lander for a few reasons. First, our global map of Europa is pretty rough, with only 13% of Europa was imaged at resolutions better than 1 kilometer. That is not good enough if you want to find a good spot to land on. While Europa may have a reputation for having the smoothest surface in the solar system, at the meter-decameter scales (on the size order of a lander), Europa is quite rough, with tectonics grooves criss-crossing the surface and no erosion to wear these features down. So high resolution imaging is need to find relatively smooth areas where it would be safe to land (global coverage at pixel scales of 100 meters is planned for the Jupiter Europa Orbiter with 1-10% coverage at 10 meters per pixel of targets of particular interest).

Secondly, an orbiter is needed to determine the thickness of the ice shell, which is important if you want to access the ocean. Designing a mission that needs to dig down through 2-5 km of ice is quite a bit different than digging through 20-30km. Plus, an orbiter might be able to find areas where the shell is thinner, further helping later lander developers pick a landing site.

Both the Europa and Titan mission would be very exciting missions. The Titan mission is a bit more ambitious though, with a NASA-built Titan orbiter that would map the surface at 50 meters per pixel (so not quite Google Earth resolution, but enough to define the major geologic processes that take place on Titan) and an Europe-built hot-air balloon and lander. The latter would land in the largest expanse of open liquid (methane instead of water) known outside of Earth.

The Europa mission is a bit more tame by comparison, but has a lot more technological development to back it up (which would help it come in somewhere close to its original budget). There are two orbiters. The NASA-built orbiter would explore the inner two large moons of Jupiter: Io and Europa; while the ESA-built orbiter would explore the outer two large satellites: Ganymede and Callisto. Unlike the Titan mission, no landers are planned with this mission, but the instruments on-board both spacecraft would allow it to provide more detailed global mapping of Europa and Ganymede than the Titan mission, which as mentioned before would only provide 50-m per pixel global mapping with selected areas at higher resolution imaged by the balloon (which would be limited to a relatively narrow latitude band since Titan's winds are mostly east-west).

The NASA-JPL website has a page with more detailed documents outlining the mission plans for each moon: http://opfm.jpl.nasa.gov/library/

Except...the Europa mission doesn't have a lander. It only has two orbiters, one would go to Europa and the other would go to Ganymede.

The main article is slashdotted but the Washington Post article suggested googling "Sampsonia Way Pittsburgh" and I don't see anything artsy. I did find two guys having a sword fight at the corner of Sampsonia Way and Federal St. though...

Good job! You just got Slashdot banned in Thailand. I hope you are proud of yourself. To Thai Authorities: Stormwatch is over there! Get him! Seriously, I agree. These regulations are ridiculous.

I agree. I voted Bailout Priorities, not because I think he can do no wrong, but because I doubt he will get much done on the other priorities other than dealing with the rest of the bailout.