On Sunday, December 7, 2014 11:43:48 PM UTC-5, palsing wrote:
On Sunday, December 7, 2014 7:31:08 PM UTC-8, RichA wrote:
http://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/rtg.html

Well, it could be because it has not tried to land on anything, it has just
been cruising along unimpeded, while sleeping most of the way. Of course, it
does have nuclear power, but then, it is way beyond the orbit of Jupiter,
which pretty much dictates such a power source.

There is a shortage of suitable RTGs for space missions, so those are likely to be reserved for those missions that absolutely require them. That is not to say that a mission that doesn't strictly require them cannot benefit from RTGs Perhaps a better mission could have been planned if RTGs had been available.

As I have suggested elsewhere in this forum, the missions that ESA has done reflect the lack of availability of RTGs; its missions have been for the inner-solar-system. Had Europe produced Pu-238, then ESA would have had more options.

The USA and USSR/Russia devoted resources to Pu-238 production and perhaps assumed some risk in doing so. Europe did not.

It sure looks now that the ESO lander accomplished every experiment that it
was scheduled to perform, and has returned results. They were just lucky, right?

They might have been very lucky and it would be refreshing to see the ESA acknowledge that possibility.

There appears to be some spin going on here... the harpoons failed.