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	European Researchers Plan for Future By Helen Gavaghan Special to SPACE.com posted: 07:01 am ET 19 September 2000

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Last Friday was an anxious day for Europe's space scientists.

At issue was the future direction of European solar system exploration and space-based astronomy between 2008 and 2013. For two difficult days, the nine members of the Space Science Advisory Committee (SSAC) of the European Space Agency (ESA) debated how, given Europe's unfavorable financial climate for space science, they could possibly put together a program that maintains a healthy balance of planetary exploration, astronomy and fundamental physics.

"Unexpectedly, we began to see our way forward at lunchtime on Friday," said Bengt Hultquist, a professor of space physics at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics and the man charged with chairing the advisory committee.

The SSAC decided that Bepi-Colombo, a $0.5 billion mission to Mercury, should be launched in 2009, a date that is a little later than some had hoped. Two years later a second mission, known as GAIA, also with a half billion-dollar price tag, should go ahead. Its mission is to map a billion stars and provide a stellar atlas from which the dynamics and relationships of the Milky Way can be understood.

Three smaller missions, each costing about $160 million, were also recommended. These include:

A 50-50 collaboration with NASA to build a $400 million spacecraft that will measure gravitational waves and open the new field of gravitational astronomy from space (LISA).
A 15-percent contribution to the NASA led project to build a follow-on mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.
A Solar Orbiter that will exploit technology developed for the Mercury mission and map the fiery depths of the inner heliosphere from polar orbit.

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) consists of three spacecraft flying 3.1 million miles (5 million kilometers) apart in the shape of an equilateral triangle as shown above.

If more money can be squeezed from the politicians, the SSAC also wants the Agency to fly a mission to detect stellar oscillations, information that will lead to an understanding of stellar structure and evolution and show whether there are habitable planets outside the solar system.

Though this proposed program sounds decidedly upbeat, the SSAC sounded a warning that the program may be too little too late to keep Europe among the leaders of space science. Currently, the ESA's space science budget is about $300 million a year (about one-fifth of NASA's annual budget for space science), and there is little evidence that this will rise.

"It's not the science and technology that poses a problem for space science in Europe, but low spending," said professor Stefano Vitale from the University of Trento in Italy and chair of the Fundamental Physics Advisory Group of the SSAC.

Europe's space-science budgetary woes began in 1995 when the space ministers from the 14 Member States of the European Space Agency capped space science spending so that it no longer rose in line with inflation. The consequence has been a fall in funding in real terms. This situation became more serious when the first flight of the Ariane 5 rocket failed, destroying a fleet of spacecraft designed to explore Earth's magnetic environment. Replacing that mission imposed severe strains on the ESA's budget.

Despite its difficulties, the ESA's policy is to maintain a balance between large and small missions and between solar system exploration (Bepi-Colombo and Solar Orbiter), astronomy (GAIA and NGST) and fundamental physics (LISA).

Roget Bonnet, director for space science at the ESA and the architect of much of the Agency's space science program for the past decade and a half, spoke with SPACE.com earlier this summer.

"We are following a strategy that would give Europe's scientists an edge in efforts to understand the evolution of the solar system," Bonnet said.

Already the ESA is collaborating with NASA in the mission to explore Saturn and its moons. The ESA has plans for a Mars mission, and a trip to Mercury would give European scientists data from the inner solar system in addition to an outer gaseous planet and Mars.

But the U.S. doesn't plan to leave the ESA unchallenged in the field of Mercury exploration. A NASA Discovery-class spacecraft known as Messenger may well get to Mercury first, but European space scientists argue that their own ambitious and comprehensive mission will dwarf the scientific return from NASA mission. And there is a possibility that solar-electric propulsion being developed by the ESA will enable Europe to beat NASA to Mercury even if NASA launches first. "We will have to wait until 2002," says Bonnet, "to know whether the technology of solar-electric propulsion will work."

Clearly, whatever the collaboration between the two Agencies, the prospect of a competition in the exploration of Mercury is adding energy to the efforts of European space scientists.

The next step in the ESA's budgetary process is for the Agency's Science Program Committee, meeting October 11 and 12, to accept or modify the SSAC's recommendations. If all goes well, as seems likely, the ESA's executive and science staff will begin defining the missions in more detail early next year, said Giacomo Cavallo, head of the ESA's coordination and planning of the science Program. Then comes the really difficult part -- convincing Europe's notoriously tight-fisted space ministers to part with the necessary funds to implement the program in full.

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