As someone who worked on JIMO, Jupiter is an extreme case, compared to
the Kuiper Belt...
On 3/2/21 8:04 PM, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Mon, 1 Mar 2021, George Herbert wrote:
...NH would have liked a closer Jupiter gravity assist than the one they actually used -- closest approach was 2.3Mkm! -- but couldn't handle the radiation dose without specialized extra-rad-hard electronics, which were out of reach for a cost-constrained mission.
If we actually want to catch ’Oumuamua the electronics should be swapped for rad hard but the rest of the design modified as little as possible; we don’t have a lot of time to futz around qualifying hardware.
With the caveat that it's not something I've paid close attention to, I fear you're badly underestimating what "swapped for rad hard" involves. As I understand it, for close encounters with Jupiter, we're not talking ordinary off-the-shelf rad-hard. E.g., I would expect the instruments to need major redesign -- and quite substantial mass growth -- to accommodate adequate shielding for their detectors. (I was once told that the Galileo orbiter's imager CCD sat inside a cube of tantalum, looking through an inch-thick window of special glass.)
Henry