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Helicopter In Space
LazyGun wrote to us about
the next generation of Titan Explorers -- the Titan Organic Explorer. The cool part is that it's a helicopter, of sorts. The probe is an interesting proposal, especially to test some of the interesting potential organic properties of Titan's make-up.
Titan's atmosphere contains lots hydrocarbons, meaning that it could perhaps support life. That makes it interesting, but it also means that any spacecraft must be highly sterilized to keep earthlife from maybe getting a foothold on Titan. Yeah, it's really cold. But there's earthlife in places that get within spitting distance of those temperatures -- and it's not entirely sure that everywhere on Titan is that cold. Previous sterilization efforts have been fairly half-assed. This one shouldn't be.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
"To get the craft to Titan, it would need to be stowed in a small entry vehicle with a heat shield. As this enters the atmosphere, a parachute will extract the helicopter from the heat shield and the rotors will spring into action.
Now comes one of the mission's greatest challenges: how do you control this helicopter in flight? It takes over an hour for radio signals from Earth to reach Titan, so the craft will have to fly itself. NASA engineers are already working on smart software to control space probes and spot signs of life..."
And the rotors spring into action! I wonder if that is before or *after* it crashes into an ethane lake and loses contact with NASA?
And, the smart software to control space probes and spot signs of life! That's rich. While we're at it lets write some software to create world peace and feed the masses!
Remember this story... because you'll probably be reading about it again in a few years:
NASA Loses Helicopter on Titan!
I presume you've read the article... Heh!
I know we've all been raised on Star Trek, but few people have qualms about stepping on an ant on their way to work. Is extra-terrestrial life all that different?
Certainly, until we have an understanding of things, we should not blindly wipe them out. But, if you recall the precautions that were taken by NASA when the first moon rocks were brought back to Earth.. We'', they're professionals after all, they know what they're doing.
Personally I'm torn on the issue. (I guess I need some more immediate problems, no?) On the one hand, we shouldn't soil yet another planet/moon/world just because we can, but on the other hand... Damn! Why not? If there's gold in them there hills, and it keep our yard a little cleaner... Maslow's pyramid comes to mind.
And hey, if there is no life there, and we use it as a petri-dish to make some, then all the better. One step closer to realizing Godhood.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Hmm, thought you needed either a bunch of current or high velocity for electro-levitation to work.
OTOH, small helicopter technology is out there. Just visit any hobby shop and be prepared to drop a thou or so if you think it's kewl. Piezoelectric gyros keep the heading straight, you need about 1HP to keep an 8 pound heli flying on earth, and that's with the aerodynamic penalty you get from a small wing.
Not sure if it's NASA or some other group sponsoring the contest, but there's an autonomous helicoptor competition out there. Last I heard, the chopper needed to find a few objects and pick them up. Not too tough to do, though I think some of these are lifting a bare-bones laptop.
Ah, the joys of running Lose98 and Netscape on my only box with a modem--clicked on the "power issues" link and the machine rebooted. At least, it didn't powercycle.
Gotta get me a Linmodem...
The article states two things -
1)this idea is at the conceptual stage
2)a probe will arrive in 2004 which will investigate the organic chemistry of the atmosphere.
He is drumming up support for the future, but this is not, and may never end up on the drawing boards (although it is an exciting proposal that should be pursued). There are a few other reasons to wait a few years before finalizing the design of this helicopter
1)analytical technology is in a state of rapid development, with labs on a chip capable of detecting single molecules getting closer every day. In a few years, we will get much more bank for the buck (and more importantly, more data for every kilogram of instruments in the probe. The author of the article, Rlph Lorenz indicated a probe size of 100kg)
2) we should wait until the results from the 2004 probe have been analysed, in order to direct the research goal of the next probe. The data from the Huygens probe may send future exploration in a new direction.
I hope moderators will obliterate the ecofreaks whining about a plutonium power source, and the earth-firster flatlanders who see no value in the space program. Life is about risk, and as soon as we turn away from exploring and understanding this universe, we have given up our birthright.
Darren
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
I know open source get's brought up at every given opportunity around here but the "smart software" to control the helicopter seems like a good open source project to me. I'm thinking a Mozilla style effort? NASA still does alot of the work but releases all the code and includes bug fixes and improvements from the community at large. I know that if I could code worth a shit this is a project I'd like to be involved in. Besides with thousands of eyes reviewing the code you know they'd get their metric conversions right!! ;->
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
I don't want to get off on a rant here, but i seem to remember the people at NASA (God luv em) discussing what a technical feat it was just to remote control the Mars Rover. They were just trying to keep it from getting stuck in a ditch or on a rock. How the hell does the guy who wrote that article think they are going to navigate a HELICOPTER?!!?!?
They talked about the AI helicopter being tested by Carnegie Mellon, but then they discussed the "Large
raindrops of methane, almost a centimetre across, drift slowly from the red haze. Geysers spout pale plumes of ethane high into the sky." Add this to the facts that the gravity is one seventh that of Earth, and no one knows what the surface looks like, and NASA has some serious planning to do.
I'm a big proponent of space exploration, but ideas like this are just too sci-fi.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
In order for an aircraft to work efficiently it has to be calculated out just right. For example, the blades on the helicopter wont generate enough lift if the atmosphere is very thin. And to complicate things, helicopters are ill suited for high winds due to its design. The helicopters power is thust downward for lift and at an angle to go somewhere. Because of this power requirement to lift up there is less forward power. A plane, however, has full forward power which is one reason a plane can go many times faster than a helicopter. The problem is with the high winds and the helicopter can fight them going nowhere. There just wouldn't be power to move. Then there is turblence. Too much turblence can rip any aircraft apart in which a helicopter is not an exception.
This idea just might flop. I can trust NASA to get around these limitations, right? RIGHT?
I doubt that NASA has cleared the use of a helecopter in Titan's airspace with the Titan Aviation Administration. Flying an unauthorized, not to mention unidentified, flying craft without agency saction could result in a diplomatic incident, and possibly an interplanetary war. Haven't these guys read any of the popular fiction?
Gonzo
Did you notice the part about "lakes of liquid ethane" in the article?
Even if temperatures below -89C (B.P. of ethane) feel like "spitting distance" to you, consider that earthlife requires a lot of conditions - a certain temperature range, sunlight, available carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen (food). Odds are, the organisms you refer to are dormant at low temperatures on earth, and are only active when the temperatures are closer to 0C.
From the article: "Titan is too cold to permit anything but a whiff of oxygen-containing compounds in its atmosphere, and all the oxygen in its surface is locked up in ice". FYI, ice is a solid. Most lifeforms known to man depend upon reactions taking place in a liquid solution. Not too many lifeforms on this planet that can do the following:
1)make their own oxygen at temperatures below -89C.
2)get by with around 1/1000 of earth's sunlight levels at the surface.
3)extract nitrogen and scavenge carbon from sources on Titan for which such an organism likely has NO existing biochemical pathways.
4)sythesize their own DNA, proteins, and sugars.
5)assuming that the available concentrations of chemicals can support life, must have the ability to deal with a LOT of chemicals which are not comon on earth (amino acids with the wrong stereochemistry, sugars that have different substitutions than the relatively few sugars which are common on earth).
6)survive an 8 year space flight while meeting the above 5 conditions.
AFTER you find something that even remotely approaches the above conditions, call me.
Darren
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
Location: A rocky patch of desert land located a few miles past the outskirts of a thriving metropolitan city. A lonely interstate highway is all that passes through the area. The climate is usually hot, but strangely, a small, but heavy, blizzard is rapidly approaching. Snow begins to fall heavily over the desert as the dirt on the ground begins to freeze over. The land itself is flat and nondescript, save for a large rock formation near where the highway runs. A large opening is present in the rock, marking the entrance of a vast cave. Oddly, several cables jut out of the cave's entrance. Large clouds of green smoke are also escaping from the cave.
The clouds of smoke suddenly cease to appear as the sound of footsteps come from the cave. As the footsteps grow louder, a large caveman stumbles out of the cave. He staggers around confused, as if under some sort of spell. In his left hand are the remnants of a used marijuana cigarette, and in his right hand he clutches a compact disc, on which the letters "open source" can be seen. On close inspection, the caveman appears to be none other than OOG_THE_CAVEMAN. As the blizzard roars, OOG, clearly affected by marijuana, walks aimlessly around the land.
OOG_THE_CAVEMAN: ARRRGHHHH!!! THIS GOOD CAVE-WEED!!! OOG LIKE BOGARTING FAT JOINT!!! OOG FUCKING HIGH AS HELL!!! MUST GO OUT AND GATHER FRITOS TO SATISFY OVERPOWERING MUNCHIES!!!
OOG walks in no clear direction. He appears to be heading towards the desolate highway which streaks across the land. But being incapacitated, OOG has great difficulty walking and maintaining his balance. Without warning, OOG stumbles over a rock and falls flat to the frozen ground, only a few yards from the highway. Because he is so stoned, OOG is unable to get up.
OOG_THE_CAVEMAN: OOG FALLEN AND OOG CAN'T GET UP!!! OOG ALSO HAVE PROBLEM STANDING UP FROM GROUND!!! CAVE-WEED REALLY GOING TO OOG HEAD!!!
OOG, unable to get up, passes out while lying on the frozen ground. The snow falls mercilessly and freezes to form ice as it hits the ground. After a few hours, our hero OOG lies trapped in a block of ice near the side of the highway.
The storm suddenly vanishes, but OOG is still embedded in the ice. Suddenly, a large, obnoxious SUV bearing several Harvard bumper stickers and driven by two yuppie students appears on the highway. One of them notices the frozen caveman and tells the driver to stop. Intrigued, they go outside where OOG is imprisoned in ice and stare at the block.
Student #1: Why isn't that OOG_THE_CAVEMAN frozen in that block of ice?
Student #2: Indeed it IS OOG! I remember reading many of his insightful posts on the website, Slashdot!
Student #1: Yes, he makes many quality posts... but many of those bad moderators are prejudiced towards intelligent caveman and abuse the 'overrated' tag to moderate him down without risking justice via metamoderation.
Student #2: Well, I think we should help out OOG and thaw him out. I just hope he doesn't break our heads with his open source cd.
The students pick up the large block of ice with OOG in it and stuff it in the vast, vast, vast backseat of their ridiculously oversized SUV. They head back on a long road trip to Harvard, which they both attend. When they arrive, they head to their dorm, where they leave OOG to thaw out in the bathtub, and then go out to eat. OOG wakes up, but because he is still incredibly high, has no idea what he is doing. He stumbles out, wanders around the Harvard campus, inadvertently attending several advanced law classes and learning much about law in the process. Dizzy and still stoned, OOG finally staggers into a large computer lab, where he passes out on the floor.
to be continued...
OOG THE OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN!!! OOG BREAK HEAD WITH OPEN SOURCE CD!!!
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS.
EXCEPT ONE.
TITAN.
ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.
Keep yer whirly-butt gizmo off Europa, too.
(Mods: if ya don't get the ref, maybe spare my karma, mmkay?)
This isn't a web browser. It's a spacecraft being sent millions of kilometers into space to a moon of a different planet after several years of travel.
It is a critical system. Do you really want a "Mozilla style effort" on your car's ABS brakes? How about a bazaar development model for a aircraft's fly-by-wire system.
Try looking at the space shuttles programs. They aren't written in C. This spacecraft would have it's own programming language, and knowing NASA it will have 5-6 code audits for each line of code in the system. Why bother making it open source when most hackers are not interested in the code proofs and hardcore language semantics that would be required to even be able to talk to the software team on this project.
Ever heard of the Oklo reactor? I didn't think so.
Yes, boys and girls, a naturally occuring nuuuuuu-clear reactor. Produced all sorts of fun stuff including plutonium.
Also, WTF do you think happens when a star goes bang? Supernova -can get some fairly heavy stuff - they found radioactive iron-60, and expect plutonium to be found on earth in supernova debris (bottom of referenced page).
Not that it would go anywhere fast on Titan. Liquid hydrocarbons are rather poor solvents for metals and other ionic species. The material would decay where it landed, long before long it got anywhere. Too bad your greenpeace membership didn't include a science education.
Darren
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
How sure can you be that Microsoft won't sue over that name? :P
- Chuq
And don't forget that the RTG that was onboard Aquarius (the Apollo 13 lunar lander turned into a lifeboat is now sitting in the ocean near Australia. It's not leaking radiation.
I hope my karma doesn't take a beating for this, but when I heard that people were actually protesting the Cassini launch, I wanted to fricking slap those ignorant people.
Sorry. I feel better now.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I see some folks saying this outright can't be done and I just disagree.
:)
There are many examples of computers (and not even fast ones by today's standards) controlling aircraft that were once thought impossible to control. Look at the F-16 and the fly-by-wire system... even better, look at the B-2 bomber and it's flying wing design. I remember reading somewhere that the B-2 just simply wouldn't be able to fly in a stable, controlled manner without the assistance of computers.
Now translate this into a completely foreign environment such as Titan. We have to assume we will know nothing about the atmosphere except for an approximation of density and maybe a reasonable idea of temperatures. We also don't have the benefit of GPS or any other method to know for certain where we are precisely on the surface.
Systems based on interia and gyroscopes have been in use on commercial aircraft from the very beginning. There were computers dumber than your TI calculator flying 707's way back in the day.
Titan has gravity, and inertia is constant, so that's really all we need. We of course won't know exactly where we are at any given point, but we could certainly make a reasonable guess.
As for winds and obstacles and so on, doppler radar could determine movement relative to the ground with a high level of precision, as well as altitude and flight-path obstacles.
Someone brought up the point that if the thing dropped on it's side, it would be screwed. This isn't really true because you could build struts that would right the craft if it ever tipped over. You could also provide a detection mechanism to identify when a landing is being attempted on uneven terrain and jump back into the air for another try.
I can't vouch for the fact this will all fit into 1000Kg, though! It sure would be a cool project even here on Earth. Maybe we could even stick some Penguin-love in it.
Any takers?
--
All opinions presented here aren't mine.
...into Saturn or Jupiter?
Putting a balloon with a good video camera on it in a gas giant's atmosphere would be the coolest thing since Viking.
I think NASA's first priority should be getting people interested in space, which means a steady stream of cool pictures of alien worlds. Forget about getting maximum scientific bang for the buck, if they can raise interest to the point it was when they started the Apollo project, they'll have lots of money to do science.
All I can say about this project is that they'd better send home some good pictures, instead of just using the images for the on-board computer.
...the bacteria that live in rocks in the Antarctic?
We really don't know all that much about the extremely hostile environment organisms, because they're hard to culture. When we rub something on agar and don't get a culture, we tend to assume nothing's there (obviously, I'm oversimplifying, but our test methods generally look for stuff that likes "good" conditions).
You make good points, but I still wouldn't be too surprised if there are a few really tough spores floating around each cubic meter or air that will survive for a thousand years in practically any conditions and are just waiting for properly miserable conditions, like you describe, to wake up.
metric/imperial unit confusion
Can you imaging if some extraterrestrials sent a probe to earth, and it was a fucking helecopter? I mean, we'd be expecting antigravity drives and warp engines and all that stuff. It'd be a major disappointment. Just imagine if there was intelligent life there - we'd be the joke of the universe...
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
It seems that the main argument for the helicopter is speed. Now this is probably nuts, but given the decades between our likely launches to Titan, couldn't we deploy snakebots on the surface and wait patiently for the data to trickle in?
Perhaps we could have an orbiting surveyor that drops a bot when it sees something interesting, or when the data from a previous drop indicate to the mission scientists back on Earth what an interesting site might look like.
If made small enough, the power consumption should be low enough to allow years of power or even local regeneration/refueling.
I know what you're going to say: Titan is too big to explore with snakes. But given the smaller size, complexity, and power of the snakes, you could have hundreds of them in the same weight/cost as one helicopter.
I see no reason why a once-a-decade mission can't take a decade to complete its data-gathering.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
Look at the F-16 and the fly-by-wire system...
Let's not forget that befor the *official* "Falcon" nickname, test pilotes refered to it as "lawn-dart" (100% true).
Systems based on interia and gyroscopes have been in use on commercial aircraft from the very beginning.
True, yet their calibration must be done in an extremly precise way. Their has been numerous reports of inertial aviation computer going of course, just because some ground crew were refulling the plane when the system was calibrated. That is also why inertail navigation is constantly rechecked against onboard star mapers.
My point beeing that, trying to calibrate such a thing on earth is already quite a problem, now just try and do the same on a planet we know very little about, a couple of million of miles away.
I'm really the first to say that we should put more funding into space exploration and Fundamental research. I'm sure, we can all imagine the 'commercial' spinoffs making an AI that can fly a chopper on some planet that's got a LAG of over an hour.
But I think that there is one thing that was not mentioned in the article, and that is the amount (or actually the lack) of data we have on Titan.
Look at the huge amount of trial and error testing that had to be done to get to valid helicopter design here no earth, where we can measure almost every variable that compose the complex notion of flying a rotating wing design. Even the prototype helicopter from Carnegie Mellon, uses technology that has been designed from, and for earth specs. BTW if you want to check out Carnegie Mellon's helicopter project, here is a link
If you want to have a look at a complex AI piloting an acutal spaceship, you can go and checkout the DeepSpace 1 prob. Which among other things is a real test bed for a lot of NASA's technology.
Murphy(c).
I think wind wouldn't really matter, since without ground features to mess it up, you don't get a lot of gusting and shearing.
;) )
I wouldn't expect a balloon to plumb the depths of Jupiter, floating around up in the sunlight is the way to do it.
(actually, pressure on Jupiter would range from 0 bar at the top to hydrogen-is-a-metal at the bottom
People who make interplanetary probes are bright enough to deal with trivial details like these.
In the interim we have managed to scrape together enough Pu-238 to meet NASA's needs by using the remaining stock from the cold war days and by purchasing it from Russia. Improvements in the efficiency of the RTG's have reduced the requirements for Pu-238. The recent Casini mission, however, required nearly 35 kg.
There are proposals on the table to produce Pu-238 in Department of Energy research and test reactors. Analysis has shown that they can produce up to 5 kg per year which NASA states is sufficient for future mission. Another alternative that is currently being considered it the restart of the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) for isotope production, including Pu-238. DOE is expected to make a decision on FFTF in the near future. It's also possible to produce Pu-238 in commercial power reactors, but there is little support for this.
I sincerely hope that problems in procuring Pu-238 do not impact future NASA missions.
Nice concept. What if it gets there and all you get is an unchanging yellow blur in front of the camera? Think of the view through your windshield driving in think fog. Or in heavy snow.
However... I suppose that we know enough about the chemical composition of the gas giant atmospheres to determine some wavelengths of electomagnetic radiation for which most of the fog would be transparent. If the camera was sensitive to those frequencies, maybe there would be something to see.
But I bet it would just be thick, pea-soup fog. And probably dark, more than a few KM down. Are there any planetary scientists reading that could provide some facts?
I like the idea of a balloon floating around Jupiter with instruments. It sounds like a pretty fool-proof probe design.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox