Surveys like this are pretty useless; & have only been published this time because it more or less suited NASA's purpose (although the high rankings for Europa; Pluto/Charon & Io must be a pain).
What they needed to ask is: how much money would the surveyed be prepared to spend on each of the targets?
Recommending that we spent US$150m on NEOs could return a useful near Earth asteroid sample without too much trouble; but the same figure for Europa wouldn't even pay the launch costs for flyby. Extending this: it might sound good for people to say that they'd pay US$500m for a Europa mission; but given that that figure wouldn't come close to covering the cost of an orbiter....
As a result of this omission, the biases were pretty obvious; & the survey is little more than junk.
Robert
Space/Science » in reply to Re: The Survey Results Are In
Re: The Survey Results Are In
