As good as JWST is and these images are, these objects are so distant the only high-res imagery you can get is by visiting them. Prior to New Horizons, our best image of Pluto, for example, was a few blurry pixels and that remained the case even until New Horizons was 99% of the way there.
The images Voyagers and New Horizons brought are nice and not to be discounted, but fly-bys vs orbit insertion missions just not the same. We should have oribters parked around each of our local major bodies. We should then have rovers on all of the solid bodies (that won't melt the thing in mere hours) after that. The MRO is such a great example.
If you have a probe design process that doesn't go through the US congress, it should be substantially faster and cheaper.
Those that have no competition inevitably end up there.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Rosett...
Launch: 2 March 2004
Mission end: 30 September 2016
Then, a bit lower on the page: 786 days in space
Huh? Anyone got insights on what type of math was used here? Is there mm/inch type conversion problem? Am I just dumb? 12 years * 365 > 786.
Jones, Drew Ryan, 2016, "Trajectories for flyby sample return at Saturn's moons", https://hdl.handle.net/2014/46163, Root, V1 at https://dataverse.jpl.nasa.gov/file.xhtml?fileId=53873&versi...
> Here an alternative and novel mission concept is analyzed to return a sample from either Titan or Enceladus, without capturing at Saturn. Instead, ballistic free return trajectories are sought which also incur a close encounter of the icy moon. The spacecraft could sample a plume (or upper atmosphere) during the hyperbolic flyby.
The time frames are on the order of 20 years.
OTOH, you would only have a few dozen hours near the planet. ("This 16 year mission, has the Titan flyby occurring about 10 hours prior to Saturn closest approach").
I'm skeptical that it's worth it... because higher powered radios just aren't that expensive, but it's not obviously (to me) impossible either.
Actually capturing your probe back in earth orbit... probably would be prohibitively expensive. But it seems like you could at least get it close by for a shorter communication distance.
Getting a probe like New Horizons to do a flyby requires a massive rocket. But to also have it be capable of slowing down to enter orbit and stick around means either it was moving slower on it's path to get there (so it takes a lot longer) or it has to carry a huge amount of fuel to burn to slow down (so it takes an even bigger rocket).
Neither option is great.
Pluto obviously was a fly-by. There were several reasons for this. Distance is a big one. Also, the more distant planets are the lower their orbital velocity. More distance = longer travel time. A higher velocity can reduce the travel time but you need to speed up at launch and slow down on arrival and that requires a higher delta-V budget. That requires extra mass of fuel, which becomes a vicious circle.
Pluto is tiny and far so a fly-by was really the only option. Even then it took 10 years to get there.
Neptune is more massive, closer and heavier. All of these help but if I'm reading [1] correctly, you'd still be realistically looking at a 30 year travel time for an insertion orbit. Having instruments hibernate for that long and work on the other end is really the biggest problem.
We're entering an era of super-heavy lifters. Maybe these will meaningfully increase the practical delta-V budgets.
Inserting a probe into orbit around Uranus (let alone Neptune) seems currently impractical just given how long it would take but that doesn't make me want it any less. Even a fly-by is better than nothing.
But the delta-V for Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are all roughly the same