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Sea Gliders for Other Worlds
An anonymous submitter writes: "NASA has, for the moment, killed funding for research leading to an underwater probe for Europa's suspected saltwater ocean. But it's possible that this is a good thing. SPACE.com proposes that U.S. Navy-funded research into underwater gliders could offer a superior means of probing Europa, exploring Venus, and even diving into the methane/ethane seas of Titan. NASA wanted a big battery and propeller machine under the ice of Europa, but that might break down, stir up water that should left undisturbed, and leak lubricants into a pristine research environment. The navy wants gliders with internal actuators because they have no flaps or propellers, no lubricant, and one already exists that could "fly" under the Pacific from Seattle to Tokyo on a penlight battery! Another model uses no batteries for locomotion at all, but instead taps heat gradients."
...but in reality, that is some really cool technology. Bravo to NASA scientists... let's see if they can get funding.
"All your base are belong to this file I send in order to have your advice."
Well once you've got your own luxury submarine this would be a good toy to take along with you beneath the waves.
air and light and time and space
Even if the device is hermetically sealed, it seems that contamination can't be avoided. For example, the little pump would have lubricants in it. No matter how the thing is sealed, eventually water will get in and the lubricants will get out. Even a solid glass sphere won't last forever. What the difference between contaminating Europe today, or doing it a million years from now? The point is to avoid contamination, right?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
But will it probe Uranus?
Now we can populate the sea!
Nice specifications there :D
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Why dont they just use that nifty sub that the Gungans Gave Qui Gon and Obi Wan, It seemed to be echo firendly, and we can finally send Jar Jar away and he will never come back!
Isn't it odd that they are concerned about damaging the environment on Europa, when producing the ability NOT to will do harm to our environment?
Go Fish.
BH
Fools! They laughed at me at the Sorbonne...!
Whatever happenned to the electromagnetic drives the navy was working on? seems to me that using magnetic fields to slither through water is preferrable to beating your way around with fins, propellers, etc.
First of this is incredible technology. Low-impact approachs to exploration are absolutely what we need to avoid screwing up other planets as we have with this planet. Its always bothered me that we trash on Mars... but anyway, one comment in the article struck me as odd:
On Venus or Europa, that process is somewhat reversed. [...]
"A reversed gradient is nothing I would be too concerned about [...]"
So, if there is a reverse gradient, then doesn't that also mean that there is going to be extrordinary convection currents as the heated (and less dense) material rises to the surface. While there logically would also have to be a down current, the mediums would have to be really turbulent.
So, in order to heat up the machine to obtain energy to move actuators, one would have to deal with the turblence (in order to get to the heat source). I wonder if batteries are need in some way...
Now the real question is, how do we get these things off of the planet (or safely disposed of) once they are done being used.
I think this is a question that needs to be addressed more often (low-impact exploration). Who knows what kind of effect our stuff could have on other forms of life. If there were batteries, they would eventually have to leak and then there's battery acid polluting an environment.
The reason this low-impact is important is because it means we can do _more_ exploration without having to worry about the effects.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
--Chag
For the North Americans (like me): Penlight Batteries are just AA batteries.
"Inside Webb's craft is a cavity filled with an organic liquid compound that contracts when cooled and expands when warmed"
It seems to me that sending an organic liquid to another planet could possibly be a bad idea. Wouldn't that be a bad contamination?
He drives such a space glider to work at Moneyline now.
I suppose a beowulf cluster of underwater gliders wouldn't be hard to imagine... just think of a pod of dolphins!
FBP!
(First Beowulf Post)
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Um.....cool
"and even diving into the methane/ethane seas of Titan"
large body of methane/ethane + nasa + battery & sparks = a whole new meaning to "umm Houston we have a problem..."
thirsty*i^2
"Ya I finished that last week, it just doesn't work"
I don't think we will have the materials that could survive for any meaningful period of time on venus for quite sometime, especially with the current NASA emphasis on keepking price down. http://www.asnsw.com/articles/btbv-lm.htm In March 1982, the Soviet Union's Venera 13 and 14 spacecraft transmitted the only color photos ever taken of the Venusian surface. The probe did not last very long, and as I recall it was not for lack of $$ and design put into it. Did it not have a diamond lens on its camera??
First thing I though of when I saw the ship.
Probably a little more eco-friendly that the SeaQuest was, but gotta love the design
Isn't that frustratingly slow? Or are they counting on Ocean currents to boost the speed?
Maybe he simply meant that they have intentionally left port 7 open on the firewall protecting the sub he is referencing...thus it is "Echo Friendly"
:-)
/. editors for their spelling mistakes - hard to say...
Just a thought - you never know, it could happen!
Alternatively, perhaps he's just another one of non-spelling idiots who habitually and hypocritically criticize the
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
...is a probe that lands on the planet, drills a hole, and then dangles a hula popper.
that will prove if there is life on europa.
have it bag up what they catch and blast off the surface again!
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I guess the GPS Antenna isn't intended for Europa...
Am I the only person thinking that NASA should focus all their efforts into getting humans on mars permanently, lest certain unmentioned Arabs destroy the Earth?? How about it, NASA?
The sentient life forms that evolved on europa will wonder if their world was seeded with life by an alien species.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I knew a Navy engineer who wanted to make a gliding torpedo. It would be slow, but so quiet that it would be undetectable. He also thought that it could be programmed to hold a ship 'hostage', poised just beneath it and set to detonate if the ship changed position. Don't know if anything ever became of his ideas, but they were interesting.
Wasn't there an episode where a team of NASA engineers tried to build a torpedo and mostly failed ...
I can just imagine fleets of these long tube like gliders deep in the ocean, programmed to travel to a specified GPS location for pick up. They could carry huge ammounts of . The DEA's new nightmare.
It's all well and good to go on long missions under the Europa ice crust, but if this is expected to be of any use to science, there must be a way of getting data back to Earth. I doubt we could equip this thing with a radio powerful enough to send data through potentially miles of water and ice. The original plan for the battery+propeller vehicle was to have it tethered, IIRC. Would this work in the same way? The cooler thing to do would be to let it go free but then returh and report to a base station (or maybe interface with a cable hanging down from the base station into the water.) The base station could then relay the data back to and orbiter and then on to Earth. Anyway, I think this could be the real technological challenge. Even if you can move far on a "penlight battery" you can't send much of a signal with one.
All they really need to do is land and sample the ice. If there is life under the ice, and there is a turnover of water onto the ice as I have read, then there will be evidence of life in the frozen water on the surface.
This would be much easier to do than getting a sub through the ice - if it turns up positive we can then go for the sub.
on of the cool things about having being in a country persueing military operations (war on terrorism) and having a rocky market - is all the cool gadgets we get out of it - just think of all the cool stuff that was invented during ww1 and ww2 (good and bad there was still alot of neet stuff)
Ave Molech Setting
Why is the government paying for this research? I don't see any tactical advantage to beeing able to explore the oceans of Europa. Space research is important, but shouldn't it be privately funded? There are more important things that the US government should be spending OUR money on.
I know it doesn't sound right to send a bunch of Plutonium to Europa (the Monolith warned us...) but we could shield it reasonably well. Once its mission is done, it could use its internal heat to melt upwards through the ice and onto the surface. There it would be isolated from the Europa ocean (the ice would re-freeze below it) and sit in a little warm puddle waiting for someone to pick it up (in, say 200 years).
This solves a problem which the other posters have already mentioned, namely that even if we send anything else which is on the drawing board, there would be no plan to get it back. It would decompose in the Europa ocean and potentially cause a lot more environmental destruction than just a couple of gamma rays.
This is the kind of unintended thing our increasing abilities re: engineering and computing lead us to. For instance the al Qaeda could get build a gliding torpedo and program it to go after an LNG tanker in a harbor. Given the efficiences, the gliding torpedo could be launched hundreds of miles away off a beach or a trawler and blow your harbor to hell. Several nations could use it and it would be difficult to trace back to the origin ship.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
I can just imagine fleets of these long tube like gliders deep in the ocean, programmed to travel to a specified GPS location for pick up. They could carry huge ammounts of drugs! This will be the DEA's new nightmare.
These things kick ass. I'm a grad student at UW in Oceanography--the pink seagliders in the second picture are built two floors below where I am typing. They're amazing--they communicate home with a cellphone antenna, and there's a 386 laptop connected to a phone line down the hall that accepts their dial-up connections. This allows them to upload their data and recieve new instructions for their mission. Currently they just have a conventional phone on-board for testing, but that will hopefully be upgraded to something like the remains of the Iridium network for the real version.
They are the result of an amazing confluence of technologies--low-power cpus, which turn on something like once every five minutes to check their situation and take a measurement, temperature and salinity probes that give reliable data without calibration for a year, battery packs, cellular communication, GPS. The great application for these, however, is not to other worlds--it's to our own. In a few years, it is hoped that there will be a global array of automated seagliders and buoys taking temperature, salinity and velocity measurements everywhere in the ocean. Basically, it will be used to construct a global climate monitoring system--something we'd never be able to do without low-power computers and sattellite tech.
As I've always said, it seems the best long-term defense against terrorism is for the US to play fair with the rest of the world. Until we do, we're all at risk.
This gliding technology seems like a perfect fit. Low power consumption, intermittent surfacing, and a simple principle.
While I'm daydreaming, wouldn't it be cool to send one of these things (or any homebuilt autonomous vehicle) around the world?
Forget the X prize, I'm offering the C prize (amount TBA) to the first person who does this with less than $500.
You'd need an efficient drive system, sail or this gliding technique comes to mind. Of course a gps, and modest CPU, a linux ucSimm perhaps. Put it all together in a solid seafaring shell, slap some solar panels on it and let it go.
You'd want to keep track of it, but I'm not sure what satellite/radio options exist. HAM would only work near civilization, and satellite is probably too expensive. But that is only a minor obstacle :)
Actually, the book "2010" (1982) didn't contain the part about "Use them together, use them in peace."
That was added in the movie (1984), along with the armed conflict between the USA and the Soviet Union in Central America.
For some reason, Peter Hyam cut out the part about the Chinese ship "Tsien" that did land on Europa, and added the political aspect.
He must have been smoking some good crack if he thought that was an improvement on the book.
First, this is not a cleanroom or even your grandmothers living room. It's an unprotected wilderness moon where all sorts of space junk has fallen on it since the beginning of time. As long as we're not worse than that, there is nothing to worry about.
Second, if we do something today that contanimates Europe in a million years, that means we have one million years to conduct more research.
In reality, we'll probably need at most a few decades until we've found out all we need to know about it, and can turn it in to something more useful. Or if it turns out to house something very delicate that we'll want to preserve for eternity, we have a million years to stop the future pollution from happening.
A glider in water has an option that a glider in the air doesn't: it can alternate between being heavier and lighter than the fluid around it.
Suppose this glider had a buoyancy tank which could be expanded or contracted like a fish's swim bladder. Whether rising or falling, it can trade altitude for horizontal motion.
It wouldn't be fast, but it probably doesn't need to be.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
There's still the matter of the delivery system, they still have to drill through ice to get to the water below.
crazy dynamite monkey
Correct me if I'm wrong (like I have to ask :-) but it hasen't been proven that there are actually liquid sea under Europa's icy surface has it? It's plausible, maybe even likely, but not certain. So maybe we're jumping the gun a bit here with all this ultra-cool betteryless glider talk?
Playing fair? Hmmmmm, there are fanatics of all stripes (any -ism you care to mention) that would like to take down the US without regard to American life or property. Playing fair is unlikely to deter such persons.
What I could agree with is that we need to 'play fair' in terms of working with nations and peoples, not boss them around like they are the hired help, or leaving them to rot with people we prop up for convenience, profit, or emotional appeal. That way we keep 94% of the world at least neutral towards us, then we can squash any -ism that is thinking about coming after us without having to fight the whole world.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
A principle based on simple values, like not tolerating suicide bombers that go after high shock-value civilian targets, is a lot clearer and a lot more defensible.
Exactly what do you see as the moral difference between suicide bombers killing innocent peolple and armies raining death on them from Apache helicopters? It seems to me that on every reasonable moral principle, if we oppose the one, we must oppose the other to the same degree.
So maybe we're jumping the gun a bit here with all this ultra-cool betteryless glider talk?
We are never jumping the gun when it comes to something ulta-cool. You build something for the sake of ultar-coolness. Forget practicality, if more stuff was done simply for the cool factor the world would be a better place.
>
Indeed when tanks, etc. are used to attack civilians without cause (Waco, for example) it is reprehensible and those ordering it should be held to a war-crimes or straight criminal trial for their conduct. No argument. However if force is needed to apprehend those responsible for mass murder, and there is opposition to those in pursuit of the murderers, then those opposing the legitimate pursuit of mass murderers have put themselves in harm's way.
Now if we could only get cars that run like that!?
The concept of using "rotors" (I guess those would by gyroscopes right?) inside the craft as a means of maneuvering reminds me of the alien craft from The Abyss. They had those weird spinning pieces inside them and not much else.
Did anybody consider that if there is any life on Europa that it could be highly evolved.
A Deep One could be waiting down there for a nice tasty morsel in the form of an Earthlings glider.
mmm. tasty inflatable sacks, just what I needed...
even if the Bunny could, it would not
...the photos nor the description mention the scale. I wish they had put a ruler or a coin in the photograph. Is it 100mm, 1m, 10m?
If we could replace the 7x7 missle planes that we ride in with underwater vehicles, that would be cool. -Israel
Can't we just make the probe out of whatever is lying around at the destination? I mean, like the iceberg ships of WWII??
How about a nice solid methane covered probe to go in that methane sea? Eventually, the methane melts into the methane sea; the probe, now presumably finished with its mission, can then sink to the bottom, non-functional and not leaking.
Granted, I didn't think this through, I'm thinking it's like crossdressing to get into a lesbian bar or something.
I think a more appropriate question would be do we have any solar cells that work in the near-total darkness that exists anywhere close to the surface of Venus. I think not. b-)
The idea of using the energy flows that exist within the local environment is a good one, though. Your Rolex idea is a great one. On Mars, we should use solar cells (or perhaps heat reservoirs that take advantage of the large temperature differences between day and night). In the atmosphere of Venus, I don't know, maybe we could use some chemical process similar to that used by the bacteria found in ocean vents. OTOH that would seem to imply some openings to the environment, and that's sort of what we're trying to avoid here.
The larger point is that it's ridiculous to power probes using radioactive crap like we've done in the past.
later,
Jess
I am programmed for etiquette, not destruction!
you're trying to reason with a socialist.
...and one already exists that could "fly" under the Pacific from Seattle to Tokyo on a penlight battery!
And how long would this take???
BTW, anyone have insights as to how "wings" work in incompressible fluids such as water? Do you get the same pressure drop from increased velocity above the wing as you do in air? Though a compressable gas ballast is usually the prefered method of producing 'lift' underwater, could you forgo lighter-than-water substances within the hull of an underwater vessel in favor of using "wings?"
Wasn't that with the chinese ship in 2081? :)
Was a long time since I read these books so I might very well be confused...
-- No, no -- Not that one!