Posted by
emmett
on from the all-these-worlds-are-yours-except-europa dept.
rhet writes, "NASA may deliberately crash the $1.5 billion Galileo spacecraft which is exploring Jupiter to avoid contaminating the moon Europa. Scientists believe simple life forms may exist on Europa. There is evidence that Europa has an ocean beneath its ice crust. Read more about it here."
NASA And the PR Fiasco.
by
PureFiction
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· Score: 4
I suppose given their current track record with crash landing expensive satelites and recon vehicales, they figure this is one operation they cannot screw up.
I just hope they dont miss and send it flying off into deep space.
No! Crash it into Europa!
by
grytpype
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· Score: 3
I say we crash Galileo into Europa! Show those European fuckers we mean bizniz!
Before everyone goes off on wasting the money
by
SgtPepper
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· Score: 5
Keep in mind that this craft is 11 years old...it's ancient in terms of spacecraft. It's original 2 year mission was extened another 2 years and is AGAIN being extened 2 more years...so we definatly got our money's worth out of it...and then some. we got 4 extra years out of a space craft that traveled a great distance, don't complain, we should retire it with dignity and honour.
Sgt Pepper Lame Sig Shamelessly Ripped from Fortune:
You think Oedipus had a problem -- Adam was Eve's mother.
Re:Before everyone goes off on wasting the money
by
Shadowlion
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· Score: 5
How much is science worth to you?
NASA spent that money to design a spacecraft that would spent several years in deep space, resist incredible amounts of radiation (the probe has already managed to go well over twice the amount of radiation it was designed for without serious glitches), computers and software on board the craft to manage all of its systems as well as do diagnostic and preventative capabilities (recongize when an overload of radiation causes the computer to reset itself and automatically correct it), and a vast amount of sensor and communication equipment. Further, it was designed to not explore just *one* world, but Jupiter and many of it's moons - a more complex logistical problem than just dropping an orbiter around, say, Mars.
Given the complexity of the task, NASA built a spacecraft that would be able to do all of the above. They really over-engineered the thing, and then put a *reasonable* cap on the lifespan of the thing (2 years). They were being conservative on the lifespan, and weren't too surprised that it was able to go for another extended mission. That it has lasted this long, though, as they've exposed it to more and more radiation, and has returned the amount and quality of data it has returned, has amazed NASA.
Galileo was one of the last of the big-money space probes, designed to last in inhospital environments and to be quite self-sufficient in case of an emergency. The newer probes, such as the various Mars probes, are much cheaper, but don't have nearly the capabilities as Galileo does - and hence we lose them when a more expensive craft, with redundant systems, diagnostic capabilities, and smarter computers would've survived.
Yes, I think what else could've been done with the money. We could've spent it on the war with drugs, which has turned out to be an exceptional failure that many question was even necessary. We could've spent it on law enforcement - and yet, with places like the LAPD, NYPD, and New Orleans, it doesn't matter how many police we have when the ones we hire are crooked in the first place. We could've built a couple of more fighter planes to add to the military - or maybe we should've just blown that money building a single B-2 bomber.
So maybe you're right - we should've spent that money hiring crooked cops, building implements of destruction, and trying to solve a non-existent drug problem.
I mean, hey, why bother *learning* anything when you can build an aircraft with the radar signature of a bumblebee?
Re:Before everyone goes off on wasting the money
by
Esperandi
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· Score: 3
Ahh, but by choosing to remain in America, he also chooses to participate in a democratic republic which requires a certain amount of people to do some bitching. So to him I say, bitch on!
Esperandi P.S. Yes, your tax money is stolen from you, there is no other word for it. Even if you WANT to pay, it is taken involuntarily with the threat of removing your freedom behind it. This is required to maintain a democratic republic, you change it so that if you don't pay the taxes, you get absolutely no benefit from anyone elses payment either.
I'm impressed that they're considering that course of action - it shows some real foresight. Europa, if inhabited (by any life) could be enormously useful ('uncontaminated') by virtue of being a huge, somewhat isolated biosphere. In addition, this is some real respect for the universe, a big thing we don't quite understand. Let's not mess up another rock if we don't need to. And why would we need to?
--
[|]
Crash Galileo into Europa as Pre-Emptive Strike
by
Savage+Henry+Matisse
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· Score: 5
Scientists warn we shouldn't rev ourselves into a tizzy over this. Any life on Europa, they assure us, is of the single-celled variety, at best. Of course, such a declaration is clearly just a smokescreen to prevent us from reaching the obvious conclusion: At this very moment, super-intelligent giant squid have their siege-rockets poised beneath Europa?s half-mile ice shell, ready to launch their imperialist onslaught. These sub-mariner beasts intend to take control of our peace-loving planet and mine us for the rich iron supplies stored in our hemoglobin. Yes, the jovian devil-fish plan to render our blood for precious structural iron, needed to build more of their planet-hoppers. Their ultimate plan: To flood the canals of Mars as a space-squid vacation resort.
At night I can hear the transmissions from their communications satellites resonating in my fillings; the hideous, scheming clacking of their beaks has rendered sleep an unattainable fantasy. They intend to devour our dogs whole and use our sports-utility vehicles as punch-bowls for their post-conquest banquet. They monitor our radio transmissions, love our mariachi music, and yet despise our hip-hop. These are truly monsters.
How long will the scientific community continue to feign ignorance of this exo-cephalopodic threat looming under Europa?s dark plutonian shores? And how long will it be until our own squid-- trusted friend and snack-- turn on us? As the first earth-dweller to fully recognize the very real threat of worldwide Europan conquest, I enjoin you: We must take up arms against this sea of troubles, and by opposing, end it.
Who's with me?
-- Much Love, "S"HM ***** (I refuse to spellcheck out of contempt for your belief system)
This Headline implies that NASA it wasting....
by
Tenement
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· Score: 5
This Headline implies that NASA it wasting money on 'shooting' probes out just to crash them now.
Remember that Galileo has done it's purpose and to avoid a possible extraterrestrial contamination of another celestial body that possibly may supporting life, they decided to crash it into another planet that (most likely) does not support any life.
NASA isn't in the habit of building something just to throw it away for no good reason. Sure, they make mistakes, but NASA is still ran by humans, and humans make 'human errors.' The technological feats that they have done (and are still doing) boggles the mind. (I'd like to see you calculate the exact vector to break orbit and travel to Jupiter over the course of 2 years with only 2 minutes of burn-time)
NASA is still going strong and I feel quite happy that my tax-dollars are being pourned into it. (Besides they brought us TANG!;-) )
Nice to see that NASA has finally woken up to the problem of space rubbish around other planets. If Gallileo does have Earth-born bacteria on it which have survived in space (there are various theories about life spreading from planet to planet by this method) it would be extremely frustrating to disrupt any current ecosystem on Europa. On the other hand, this concern will make the job of examining Europa in the future more tricky, regardless of what they do with Galileo (dropping it into the Jovian atmosphere or crashing it into Io both sound like possibilities to gain interesting data on either planet/moon). If we are going to go explore Europa for signs of life, we are almost certainly going to have to do it remotely with 'sterilized' equipment - sending a few astronauts down to have look isn't going to help in the attempts to not disrupt any life already there.
Of course, our own orbit is now strewn with bits of satellites and rocket boosters - thankfully it all tends to wander around at the same speeds as the spacecraft in orbit, but it gets a little bit unnerving to wonder about the future of colonizing the galaxy when you have to dodge the last 100 years of waste products in getting started.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
-- Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't
necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Superior: See if you can focus it. We want to know if there's any real life on Europa. We don't want to contaminate it.
Subordinate: Sir, I'm seeing something. It looks like... Like a...
Superior: Yes?
Subordinate: My God... We won't have to worry about contaminating Europa, sir.
Superior: Dammit, what is it?!?
Subordinate: It's a Starbucks, sir.
--
"This is a revolution, dammit! We're going to have to offend SOMEBODY!" - John Adams
Michael Chisari
Re:Cosmic Radiation Sterilisation
by
Bearpaw
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· Score: 3
Wouldn't any microbes from earth that made it onto the spacecraft by now have been killed by cosmic radiation? The craft has been in space for several years now. Even the most hardy microbes should have perished by now?
We don't know. That's the point.
Even if microbes did make it through space and survice an impact what is the chances that any alien life would be compatible with ours?
We don't know. That's the point. There is no basis (yet) on which to judge those odds. Anyone who says otherwise is indulging in a WAG whether they admit it or not.
Why take any chance? Though it's functioned way beyond it's expected time, the craft is nearing the end of its usefulness. It's time to clean up after ourselves. For a change.
Oh come on we all know what happened
by
MosesJones
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· Score: 3
Nasa Scientist A: I'm getting bored at looking at Jupiter
Nasa Scientist B: I know what you mean, same old same odl
A: Mind you those comets that smashed into it were pretty cool B: Yeah, 11 years watching and its all clouds and methane, where is the fun in that ? A: We need to do something exciting.
Enter Military Man C
C: Hi Guys, anything new ? A: Nope, just a big red dot and a possible ocean. B: And of course the black bits. C: Okay I'll be off. A: Hang On, we're just wondering how to make this job more interesting, any ideas ? C: Well you could take the military approach... B: Which is ? C: If it costs over a billion dollars, make sure it crashes, we did it with the Stealth Fighters and Bombers, its the whole purpose of the ICBMs. And they make WAY cool noises and pretty lights when they go up. A: You mean you crash these things on purpose ? C: Sure sometimes, but we video everything just incase we get lucky by accident.
And that ladies and gentlemen was how the plan was formed.
I know, I was coffee mug D.
-- An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I can see the conversation between NASA and the spacecraft now:
Galileo: Well, I've put in my long hard years for the company, and after having put it off for a few years, I think it's time to retire and start collecting social security.
NASA: That's good, because we were coming up with a spectacular retirement package for you.
Galileo: Great, so what does my golden parachute look like?
NASA: [whispers into Galileo's ear]
Galileo: A MASSIVE HELLISH FIREBALL?!?!
--
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Why can't they just leave it up there orbitting and taking pictures? Is it running out of fuel?
Yes. It's also running out of radiation tolerance, RTG power and a number of other things. Maneuvering fuel is apparently set to run out first, but the vehicle is not going to last much longer regardless. To prevent it from contaminating Europa (and throwing off any search for life we may do there in the future), it has to be prevented from crashing there. One certain method of doing this is to crash it somewhere else. Crude, but highly effective. --
-- Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Microsoft may Deliberately Crash Windows
by
xant
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· Score: 3
Microsoft may deliberately crash the $200 Windows 2000 OS which is exploring software stores and computers worldwide at this moment to avoid contaminating system memory. MS Programmers believe simple life forms may exist in your motherboard, as evidenced by the system "bus" which they obviously must use for transportation. An MS spokesman made a statement: "If our OS didn't crash so much, these simple creatures wouldn't be able to survive in your computer. Stable, free OS's run too long, not allowing the bus creatures to come up for air often enough. We're just doing the humane thing."
-- It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Does anyone else think that country is worthy of ridicule, that will crash $1.5 billion of equipment to avoid even the remote chance that it might hurt some single-celled bacteria, and then legalize the destruction of millions of unborn babies? Do those mythical one-celled motes from outer space have more rights than human children?
whoa, whoa. calm, cool, collected.
this is space garbage. the mission was judged to be worth whatever they spent on it. then they got three times as much use out of it as was in the original mission guidelines. as much as we litter our own orbits and ecosphere, I hope you haven't gotten the idea that it's a good idea.
they can gain valuable data by doing a suicide mission into Jupiter or Io. don't get the idea that they picked these targets randomly.
*sigh* I really wasn't in the mood for an abortion fight, so I'm just going to say a few things, since it's offtopic:
one prospective member of one (overcrowded) species != wiping out the entire moon's worth of life (and/or) spoiling all future studies and knowledge we might gain from Europa
unborn baby != child
incest
rape
extreme threat to mother's health
babies in plastic bags in dumpsters. why? guess.
many, many abused, unhappy, neglected children
I'd recognize that hyphenation style anywhere!
by
arthurs_sidekick
·
· Score: 3
T. Herman Zweibel has started reading/. !!!
-- "Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
I don't really want a bacteria which survives that environment back on Earth
Well, there are lots of extremophiles here already that survive very "harsh" conditions. Large numbers of microbes are anaerobic, possibly the earliest life here was anaerobic. Geologists and evolutionists get all excited over the presence of oxidized iron because they believe that it's the result of the emergence of microbes that produced the stuff and then other ones emerged that were able to use it. There are bacteria Deinoccus radiodurans that are very happy in strongly radioactive environments, bacteria that eat "poisonous" contaminants. That's all apparently home-grown without any need to postulate microbes hitchhiking in on space debris. That last point is why it's so darn important NOT to contaminate Europa - supposing we find life there after possible contamination. We look at it and it's similar to Earth microbes - cool! That means that there are only a limited number of paths for evolution to take to produce single-celled life, it's independent convergence[*}.....oh, wait no, didn't we just smash a possibly contaminated spaceprobe in here about 20 years ago? {*} Yeah, I know it's damned unlikely to get the same combination of bases/nucleotides at the sequence level necessary for the _true_ definition of convergence, but let's just think even about similar phenotypic morphology - wouldn't it be neat if they had flagella?
NASA always likes crashing things. In fact they are getting real good at it lately.
If they could get the tech and bandwidth going to relay back high-res 5000fps video (so you can later savor every frame in super slo-mo) on the way down they'd have some killer pay-per-view potential there. Great potential revenue stream.
I know I'd pay US$40.00 to watch a piece of space junk slam into a planet. Earth, even
If your post was meant to be funny, it didn't contain enough hyperbole to be blatently tongue-in-cheek. So I'll just treat it as ignorance.
You know what Jupiter's made of, right? 92% hydrogen, 7% helium, mostly methane for the rest, those sorts of things. At the upper atmosphere, it's more than a thousand degrees celcius, and it's all whipping about rather harshly. And oh yeah, no water. If there is life there, it doesn't resemble anything we have on earth, and whatever we bring from earth wouldn't be able to survive if it got there. And then there's the little problem about how the spacecraft will burn up once it enters the planet's atmosphere, which is after all, all of it (except perhaps for the metalic hydrogen core, which if it exists wouldn't make a lick of difference here). This is in stark contrast to Europa, which doesn't have an appreciable atmosphere and so if we lob something at it, it'll remain intact until it hits the surface.
Soooooo.....What happens if the crash site is currently occupied with Life Forms that we DON'T suspect, hmm? So in an ironic ending to the life of Galileo, it crashes into a planet with life forms and introduces extra-Jupiterian life to divide and conquer.
Yes, it'd be perfeclty ironic, since it'd crap all over lots of our biological and astronomical theories, but that doesn't mean it's possible. You're also forgetting the little bit about how there is no "landing site" per se -- just a spot floating in the outer atmosphere.
Or, we could send it off into deep space, and discover it 300 years from now as a tremendous space probe named G'leo.
Except the whole problem in the first place is that this thing doesn't have any extra fuel lying around for such a purpose. If we could just go ahead and send it off into deep space, it'd still be useful and we'd use it for that. Heck, the Voyager 2 is still sending back data from outside the solar system, and we're praying it'll last another twenty years and make it to measure the helioshock out there. But escaping the gravity of Jupiter is not a simple thing to do without any propulsion. Have you stopped to wonder why Jupiter has so many moons and trojan asteroids in the first place?
--
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Put Galileo in a Museum?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 4
Now, if they were able to get the probe back to Earth, and put it in a museum, THAT would be dignified
If it were only possible, then I'd be totally in favor of returning Galileo to Earth. Unfortunately, it barely has enough fuel to maintain its orbit around Jupter, let alone enough fuel to get all the way back to Earth. Furthermore, any vehicle coming to Earth from Jupiter is gonna be going damn fast when it gets here, and Galileo does not have any method of slowing down (no fuel, no aerobraking).
Galileo may also be somewhat radioactive after 11 years in space and multiple high-radiaion banzai runs past Io. Not the sort of object you'd want to hang up in the Smithsonian.
By the way, we've got a complete Saturn V with zero milage up on blocks by the front gate here. She's a bit run down and the serial numbers don't all match. You'll need to supply your own fuel, too, sorry.
-- a real Person From NASA(tm)
Let's imagine the conversation at NASA:
by
JudgePagLIVR
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· Score: 3
"hey Bob?"
"Yeah Frank"
"Remember that metrics/english conversion we didn't make, how it made the martian thingy crash?"
"Yeah Frank, I remember that. Why do you ask?"
Well, the jupiter thingy has the same error. I think it's gonna crash too"
"Jehosephat, Bob! Quick! Release a press statement that we're going to do it on purpose in order to... um... um... Save The Environment! yeah, that's the trick"
"I wish I were smart like you, Frank."
-- Judge Pag, the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed
Re:Running on fumes?? Was Martian Chronicles
by
Tau+Zero
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· Score: 4
..why not a few good orbits around Jupiter to build up momentum?
I lack the time to go into detail about this, and Slashdot isn't the place to try to deliver a tutorial in orbital mechanics anyway (even if I was expert enough to teach such a thing, which I'm not). So the short answers are:
It doesn't work like that.
Momentum is conserved, it has to come from somewhere, and there's no available source other than the on-board rocket motors. "Winding up" won't boost anything any more than Earth will fling itself into interstellar space as a result of 4.3 billion circles around Sol.
The kind of celestial billiard shots which got Galileo to Jupiter in the first place (first Venus, then Earth, then Earth again; the so-called VEEGA) require massive bodies to apply the kicks (gravity is the mediating force). This also requires being in roughly the same orbital plane... I think. The moons of Jupiter are too small to apply big enough kicks, and Galileo is in a nearly-polar orbit which cannot take good advantage of them anyway.
So that's my take on the issue.
This sort of project (even if unsuccessful) would teach NASA how to use unfueled satellites efficiently.
NASA/JPL has been doing this since before you were born. Just getting Galileo to Jupiter without the Centaur booster originally specified for the purpose (NASA refused to allow hydrogen-fuelled rockets in the Shuttle cargo bay after Challenger) required wizardry and finesse beyond your dreams. See this link for more information on the VEEGA maneuver, and this for data on the Venus-Venus-Earth-Jupiter slingshot used to get Cassini to Saturn. --
-- Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Money's hardly a factor; don't trash the subject!
by
Tau+Zero
·
· Score: 4
The point of the crashing maneuver is to prevent Galileo from crashing into Europa and possibly contaminating it with Earth organisms, thereby making it difficult or impossible to determine if life arose there naturally. Galileo's mission is almost done, but the value of future missions is at stake here. We sterilized the Viking probes to avoid just this scenario. --
-- Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Re:You're absolutely right...
by
ralphclark
·
· Score: 3
Smashing it into pieces right where we can see it sounds just fine.
If we just let it zoom off into space it'll only get damaged by a meteor collision, get sucked through a black hole, drift aimlessly for two hundred years, get picked up and repaired by an race of alien robots and then return to destroy the Earth. And you know it.
PS. I know we have two Voyager craft that run a similar same risk. But one of those is bound to go through a wormhole and get lost in the Delta Quadrant. Or something.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose given their current track record with crash landing expensive satelites and recon vehicales, they figure this is one operation they cannot screw up.
I just hope they dont miss and send it flying off into deep space.
I say we crash Galileo into Europa! Show those European fuckers we mean bizniz!
- Have a picture
Keep in mind that this craft is 11 years old...it's ancient in terms of spacecraft. It's original 2 year mission was extened another 2 years and is AGAIN being extened 2 more years...so we definatly got our money's worth out of it...and then some. we got 4 extra years out of a space craft that traveled a great distance, don't complain, we should retire it with dignity and honour.
Sgt Pepper
Lame Sig Shamelessly Ripped from
Fortune:
You think Oedipus had a problem -- Adam was Eve's mother.
I'm impressed that they're considering that course of action - it shows some real foresight. Europa, if inhabited (by any life) could be enormously useful ('uncontaminated') by virtue of being a huge, somewhat isolated biosphere. In addition, this is some real respect for the universe, a big thing we don't quite understand. Let's not mess up another rock if we don't need to. And why would we need to?
[|]
At night I can hear the transmissions from their communications satellites resonating in my fillings; the hideous, scheming clacking of their beaks has rendered sleep an unattainable fantasy. They intend to devour our dogs whole and use our sports-utility vehicles as punch-bowls for their post-conquest banquet. They monitor our radio transmissions, love our mariachi music, and yet despise our hip-hop. These are truly monsters.
How long will the scientific community continue to feign ignorance of this exo-cephalopodic threat looming under Europa?s dark plutonian shores? And how long will it be until our own squid-- trusted friend and snack-- turn on us? As the first earth-dweller to fully recognize the very real threat of worldwide Europan conquest, I enjoin you: We must take up arms against this sea of troubles, and by opposing, end it.
Who's with me?
Much Love,
"S"HM
*****
(I refuse to spellcheck out of contempt for your belief system)
This Headline implies that NASA it wasting money on 'shooting' probes out just to crash them now.
;-) )
Remember that Galileo has done it's purpose and to avoid a possible extraterrestrial contamination of another celestial body that possibly may supporting life, they decided to crash it into another planet that (most likely) does not support any life.
NASA isn't in the habit of building something just to throw it away for no good reason. Sure, they make mistakes, but NASA is still ran by humans, and humans make 'human errors.' The technological feats that they have done (and are still doing) boggles the mind. (I'd like to see you calculate the exact vector to break orbit and travel to Jupiter over the course of 2 years with only 2 minutes of burn-time)
NASA is still going strong and I feel quite happy that my tax-dollars are being pourned into it. (Besides they brought us TANG!
Cheers.
--
Nice to see that NASA has finally woken up to the problem of space rubbish around other planets. If Gallileo does have Earth-born bacteria on it which have survived in space (there are various theories about life spreading from planet to planet by this method) it would be extremely frustrating to disrupt any current ecosystem on Europa. On the other hand, this concern will make the job of examining Europa in the future more tricky, regardless of what they do with Galileo (dropping it into the Jovian atmosphere or crashing it into Io both sound like possibilities to gain interesting data on either planet/moon). If we are going to go explore Europa for signs of life, we are almost certainly going to have to do it remotely with 'sterilized' equipment - sending a few astronauts down to have look isn't going to help in the attempts to not disrupt any life already there.
Of course, our own orbit is now strewn with bits of satellites and rocket boosters - thankfully it all tends to wander around at the same speeds as the spacecraft in orbit, but it gets a little bit unnerving to wonder about the future of colonizing the galaxy when you have to dodge the last 100 years of waste products in getting started.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Seriously, this makes sense. Once they've squeezed the last bit of use out of it, why not?
Nice to see someone thinking a little ahead for once.
(ObRef: "All these worlds are yours-- except Europa. Attempt no landings there.")
Superior: Do you see anything?
Subordinate: Sir, I'm starting to get an image.
Superior: See if you can focus it. We want to know if there's any real life on Europa. We don't want to contaminate it.
Subordinate: Sir, I'm seeing something. It looks like... Like a...
Superior: Yes?
Subordinate: My God... We won't have to worry about contaminating Europa, sir.
Superior: Dammit, what is it?!?
Subordinate: It's a Starbucks, sir.
--
"This is a revolution, dammit! We're going to have to offend SOMEBODY!" - John Adams
Michael Chisari
We don't know. That's the point.
Even if microbes did make it through space and survice an impact what is the chances that any alien life would be compatible with ours?
We don't know. That's the point. There is no basis (yet) on which to judge those odds. Anyone who says otherwise is indulging in a WAG whether they admit it or not.
Why take any chance? Though it's functioned way beyond it's expected time, the craft is nearing the end of its usefulness. It's time to clean up after ourselves. For a change.
Nasa Scientist A: I'm getting bored at looking at Jupiter
Nasa Scientist B: I know what you mean, same old same odl
A: Mind you those comets that smashed into it were pretty cool
B: Yeah, 11 years watching and its all clouds and methane, where is the fun in that ?
A: We need to do something exciting.
Enter Military Man C
C: Hi Guys, anything new ?
A: Nope, just a big red dot and a possible ocean.
B: And of course the black bits.
C: Okay I'll be off.
A: Hang On, we're just wondering how to make this job more interesting, any ideas ?
C: Well you could take the military approach...
B: Which is ?
C: If it costs over a billion dollars, make sure it crashes, we did it with the Stealth Fighters and Bombers, its the whole purpose of the ICBMs. And they make WAY cool noises and pretty lights when they go up.
A: You mean you crash these things on purpose ?
C: Sure sometimes, but we video everything just incase we get lucky by accident.
And that ladies and gentlemen was how the plan was formed.
I know, I was coffee mug D.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Microsoft may deliberately crash the $200 Windows 2000 OS which is exploring software stores and computers worldwide at this moment to avoid contaminating system memory. MS Programmers believe simple life forms may exist in your motherboard, as evidenced by the system "bus" which they obviously must use for transportation. An MS spokesman made a statement: "If our OS didn't crash so much, these simple creatures wouldn't be able to survive in your computer. Stable, free OS's run too long, not allowing the bus creatures to come up for air often enough. We're just doing the humane thing."
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Does anyone else think that country is worthy of ridicule, that will crash $1.5 billion of equipment to avoid even the remote chance that it might hurt some single-celled bacteria, and then legalize the destruction of millions of unborn babies? Do those mythical one-celled motes from outer space have more rights than human children?
whoa, whoa. calm, cool, collected.
T. Herman Zweibel has started reading /. !!!
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
Well, there are lots of extremophiles here already that survive very "harsh" conditions. Large numbers of microbes are anaerobic, possibly the earliest life here was anaerobic. Geologists and evolutionists get all excited over the presence of oxidized iron because they believe that it's the result of the emergence of microbes that produced the stuff and then other ones emerged that were able to use it. There are bacteria Deinoccus radiodurans that are very happy in strongly radioactive environments, bacteria that eat "poisonous" contaminants. That's all apparently home-grown without any need to postulate microbes hitchhiking in on space debris.
That last point is why it's so darn important NOT to contaminate Europa - supposing we find life there after possible contamination. We look at it and it's similar to Earth microbes - cool! That means that there are only a limited number of paths for evolution to take to produce single-celled life, it's independent convergence[*}.....oh, wait no, didn't we just smash a possibly contaminated spaceprobe in here about 20 years ago? {*} Yeah, I know it's damned unlikely to get the same combination of bases/nucleotides at the sequence level necessary for the _true_ definition of convergence, but let's just think even about similar phenotypic morphology - wouldn't it be neat if they had flagella?
NASA always likes crashing things. In fact they are getting real good at it lately.
If they could get the tech and bandwidth going to relay back high-res 5000fps video (so you can later savor every frame in super slo-mo) on the way down they'd have some killer pay-per-view potential there. Great potential revenue stream.
I know I'd pay US$40.00 to watch a piece of space junk slam into a planet. Earth, even
If your post was meant to be funny, it didn't contain enough hyperbole to be blatently tongue-in-cheek. So I'll just treat it as ignorance.
You know what Jupiter's made of, right? 92% hydrogen, 7% helium, mostly methane for the rest, those sorts of things. At the upper atmosphere, it's more than a thousand degrees celcius, and it's all whipping about rather harshly. And oh yeah, no water. If there is life there, it doesn't resemble anything we have on earth, and whatever we bring from earth wouldn't be able to survive if it got there. And then there's the little problem about how the spacecraft will burn up once it enters the planet's atmosphere, which is after all, all of it (except perhaps for the metalic hydrogen core, which if it exists wouldn't make a lick of difference here). This is in stark contrast to Europa, which doesn't have an appreciable atmosphere and so if we lob something at it, it'll remain intact until it hits the surface.
Soooooo.....What happens if the crash site is currently occupied with Life Forms that we DON'T suspect, hmm? So in an ironic ending to the life of Galileo, it crashes into a planet with life forms and introduces extra-Jupiterian life to divide and conquer.
Yes, it'd be perfeclty ironic, since it'd crap all over lots of our biological and astronomical theories, but that doesn't mean it's possible. You're also forgetting the little bit about how there is no "landing site" per se -- just a spot floating in the outer atmosphere.
Or, we could send it off into deep space, and discover it 300 years from now as a tremendous space probe named G'leo.
Except the whole problem in the first place is that this thing doesn't have any extra fuel lying around for such a purpose. If we could just go ahead and send it off into deep space, it'd still be useful and we'd use it for that. Heck, the Voyager 2 is still sending back data from outside the solar system, and we're praying it'll last another twenty years and make it to measure the helioshock out there. But escaping the gravity of Jupiter is not a simple thing to do without any propulsion. Have you stopped to wonder why Jupiter has so many moons and trojan asteroids in the first place?
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
If it were only possible, then I'd be totally in favor of returning Galileo to Earth. Unfortunately, it barely has enough fuel to maintain its orbit around Jupter, let alone enough fuel to get all the way back to Earth. Furthermore, any vehicle coming to Earth from Jupiter is gonna be going damn fast when it gets here, and Galileo does not have any method of slowing down (no fuel, no aerobraking).
Galileo may also be somewhat radioactive after 11 years in space and multiple high-radiaion banzai runs past Io. Not the sort of object you'd want to hang up in the Smithsonian.
By the way, we've got a complete Saturn V with zero milage up on blocks by the front gate here. She's a bit run down and the serial numbers don't all match. You'll need to supply your own fuel, too, sorry.
-- a real Person From NASA(tm)
"hey Bob?"
"Yeah Frank"
"Remember that metrics/english conversion we didn't make, how it made the martian thingy crash?"
"Yeah Frank, I remember that. Why do you ask?"
Well, the jupiter thingy has the same error. I think it's gonna crash too"
"Jehosephat, Bob! Quick! Release a press statement that we're going to do it on purpose in order to... um... um... Save The Environment! yeah, that's the trick"
"I wish I were smart like you, Frank."
Judge Pag, the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed
- It doesn't work like that.
- Momentum is conserved, it has to come from somewhere, and there's no available source other than the on-board rocket motors. "Winding up" won't boost anything any more than Earth will fling itself into interstellar space as a result of 4.3 billion circles around Sol.
- The kind of celestial billiard shots which got Galileo to Jupiter in the first place (first Venus, then Earth, then Earth again; the so-called VEEGA) require massive bodies to apply the kicks (gravity is the mediating force). This also requires being in roughly the same orbital plane... I think. The moons of Jupiter are too small to apply big enough kicks, and Galileo is in a nearly-polar orbit which cannot take good advantage of them anyway.
So that's my take on the issue. NASA/JPL has been doing this since before you were born. Just getting Galileo to Jupiter without the Centaur booster originally specified for the purpose (NASA refused to allow hydrogen-fuelled rockets in the Shuttle cargo bay after Challenger) required wizardry and finesse beyond your dreams. See this link for more information on the VEEGA maneuver, and this for data on the Venus-Venus-Earth-Jupiter slingshot used to get Cassini to Saturn.--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The point of the crashing maneuver is to prevent Galileo from crashing into Europa and possibly contaminating it with Earth organisms, thereby making it difficult or impossible to determine if life arose there naturally. Galileo's mission is almost done, but the value of future missions is at stake here. We sterilized the Viking probes to avoid just this scenario.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Smashing it into pieces right where we can see it sounds just fine.
If we just let it zoom off into space it'll only get damaged by a meteor collision, get sucked through a black hole, drift aimlessly for two hundred years, get picked up and repaired by an race of alien robots and then return to destroy the Earth. And you know it.
PS. I know we have two Voyager craft that run a similar same risk. But one of those is bound to go through a wormhole and get lost in the Delta Quadrant. Or something.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction