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NASA May Send Landers To Europa In 2020
wisebabo writes "So here's a proposal by NASA to send landers to Europa to look for life. They are sending two landers because of the risks in landing on Europa. They got that right! First is the 500 million mile distance from the Sun, which will probably necessitate RTGs (Juno uses solar panels, but they are huge) and will cause at least an hour of lag time for communications. Then there is the intense gravitational field of Jupiter, which will require a lot of fuel to get into Jovian and then Europan orbit. (It's equivalent to traveling amongst the inner planets!) The radiation in space around Jupiter is tremendous, so the spacecraft may need to be 'armored' like Juno. Landing on Europa is going to be crazy; there aren't any hi-res maps of the landing areas (unlike Mars) and even if there were, the geography of Europa might change due to the shifting ice. Since there is no atmosphere, it'll be rockets down all the way; very expensive in terms of fuel — like landing on the Moon. Finally, who knows what the surface is like; is it a powder, rock hard, crumbly or slippery? In a couple respects, looking for life on Titan (where we've already landed one simple probe) would be a lot easier: dense atmosphere, no radiation, radar mapped from space, knowledge of surface). If only we could do both!"
I think Europe should send probes to Europa.
Weren't we warned about not not landing there? :-P
The awkward moment when you read "NASA May Send Landers To Europe In 2020"
"Hello, IT... Have you tried turning it off and on again? Yeah... No problem."
With all the rabid budget cutting going on, we'll be lucky if NASA is still around in 2020.
Have we forgotten? "All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there." (Stupid NO-CAPS slashdot filter...)
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
I opened slashdot while wrapping Christmas presents and read the headline as "Nasa May Send Lawyers to Europa." My thought was, "Be sure to send them all."
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." -JFK
This does not sound like a right schedule - as the Jupiter Europa Orbiter mission was put on hold recently. Having worked a bit on it, the expected level of radiation was very high, even when compared to Juno. It follows on a long tradition of missions to Europe being cancelled (see the Jupiter Icy Moon Orbiter which was cancelled in 2005). Fans of Arthur C. Clarke will see a trend there. The Laplace mission (from ESA) which is aiming for Ganymede is currently trying to pick on bits of JEO science targets by adding flybys of Europe to the original mission plan - we will see how far it goes.
I am writing to inform you that we have indeed taken your warning to heart. In order to avoid making contact with Europa, we have placed NASA in charge of the project, thus insuring that your admonition will be heeded for the foreseeable future.
Yours truly,
The people of Earth
P.S. Sit back and enjoy the occasional fireworks display in low Earth orbit or between Earth and Mars.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why? The nursing home should have a TV. Just ask the nice nurses to switch to the NASA channel.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
From the previous slashdot story about "Rare Earths". The argument was made that the a large moon (which may be very rare) might be necessary to keep a planet's axis from wobbling. But what about an exo-moon around a (much larger) planet?
If having a large moon helps stabilize the earth's rotation, what about if an exo-"planet" is, in fact a moon around a much larger (probably gas giant) planet, just like Pandora in the movie "Avatar"? One would imagine that any variation in its climate due to wobbling would be completely eliminated.
While the "exo-moon" would almost certainly be tidally locked to the giant planet, as long as the orbital period wasn't too long (a week?) the difference in temperature between night and day would hopefully not be too pronounced. For example Io, has a period of 1.7 days. If the moon had a really thick atmosphere (like Titan) then this would probably not matter in the slightest as the "air" would likely distribute the heat quite effectively (but could be windy!).
Another thing we've learned by looking at these moons orbiting the gas giants is that they could have almost any amount of tectonic activity which is important for things like plate tectonics which is sometimes regarded as being essential for its effects on our climate. From super-volcanic Io to frozen Callisto, we see that tidal effects from a gas giant can pump hugely varying amounts of energy into a moon.
Of course, radiation may be a concern for most DNA based life (some DNA based life, like tardigrads are remarkably resilient though). I don't know why some gas giants like Jupiter have lethal (to us) amounts of radiation while others don't. So maybe this is a non-issue.
So maybe we should be looking for exo-moons orbiting gas giants in the habitable zone! How many are there? Obviously I don't know but there don't seem to be any dearth of gas giants orbiting other stars. As for the number of moons orbiting these gas giants, who knows but judging from our own solar system (Jupiter has 33 satellites of which 4 are "large") it seems that one or more would be at the right distance from the planet to benefit (but not too much) from tidal energy. Just for an example imagine if Jupiter was in the habitable zone. All the Galilean satellites except Io would be excellent candidates for COMPLEX life (presumably underwater).
What wavelength radio waves penetrate underwater? Maybe SETI should be listening on those frequencies! :)
Then there is the intense gravitational field of Jupiter, which will require a lot of fuel to get into Jovian and then Europan orbit. (It's equivalent to traveling amongst the inner planets!)
Can someone please explain why a strong gravitational field would require more fuel? Wouldn't a stronger pull require less fuel to get there since the Jovian gravity is pulling you there?
"All these worlds Are yours except Europa Attempt no Landing there"
Yep, that part is from the book 2010 by Arthur C Clarke
The rest is from a crappy movie based on the book
Of course we could do both. We could do a bunch of them. Just give the F35 a skip or not build another aircraft carrier or some other useless piece of military hardware, or not bail out yet another bank that took your pension fund to the casino and put it all on Red 37. And lost.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
A group of congress people killed it , on purpose, by making it pay-forward its pension fund for 75 years. Almost no company could survive that.
Is that what any of the news reports say? No. Most of them say "oh, email killed it". complete horse shit. if they hadn't had to pre-fund their pension, they would have been rather profitable in recent years. Unlike, say, Goldman Sachs, Fannie Mae, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, General Motors, Chrysler, and every other bailed out shit hole full of ivy league douchebags and hedge fund assholes.
the massive number of pointless military bases, oceans of bureaucracy, contractors that chage twice as much to do the same work as govt employees, contractors with corrupt links to govt leaders who decide who gets the money, pointless projects that spend billions and are cancelled halfway through planning stages.
the US military is essentially one gigantic social welfare program.
the only way to get a space program going is to spread the production out to various places, so that congress can suckle the fat teat of mother federal government and bring that bacon home to their districts.
Is anyone arguing with that? I'm a commercial space proponent and I work on NASA-funded planetary science missions.
The commercial space community states explicitly that NASA should be performing the "Lewis and Clark" job -- in fact thats the exact phrase we use. However, rides to orbit are no longer cutting edge technology, and have a proven opportunity for profit, and this is why we call for the government to stop insisting on its own launchers and use commercially available ones wherever possible, and to foster a market where it is possible to form one.
In planetary science we actively support this model, since Juno, MSL and GRAIL (the three recently launched missions) all launched on commercially purchased launch vehicles (though ULA is a bit of a monopoly so its not the healthiest commercial market).
That's pure spin. Changing the USPS to account for 75 years worth of liabilities brings it in line with the private sector. It used to be under normal government accounting rules, which are a lot more "flexible." If anybody in the private sector tries the accounting tricks the government lets itself get away with, they find themselves on the sharp end of an audit pretty damn quick.
In the private sector, federal law requires you to fully fund a pension plan, including all future liabilities. That's stricter than the USPS's 75 year requirement. In practice they're pretty similar, because you're not likely to have any significant liabilities beyond 75 years.
it seems to me that dumping thousands of nanobots across the planet would be easier than relying on one big lander to safely and smoothly land on an unseen location.
Yes, exactly. Not only that, but instead of burning so much fuel to get into Europa orbit and land on the surface due to the high gravity in the Jovian system and the lack of atmosphere on Europa, it would make a lot more sense to use antigravity engines, or better yet simply teleport probes to the surface. Why don't we do that?