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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!"
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!
"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
You have to remember that there's no friction in space. Going down a gravity well is easy, but stopping at the bottom requires energy. It's like a roller coaster heading down from a peak, with Jupiter at the bottom. As you approach Jupiter, it's gravity will speed you up (relative to Jupiter). Unless you put in energy to counteract that extra speed, you shoot past and fly right up the other side of the gravity well (up the next peak).
That said, the summary is wrong. Jupiter has lots of moons. You can do the opposite of a gravitational slingshot. Approach the moon from the forward direction, and thereby transfer some of your kinetic energy to the moon. Do it enough times and you're in Jupiter's orbit. That's pretty much how Galileo and Cassini were inserted into orbits around Jupiter and Saturn. You only need fuel or aerobraking to enter into orbit around planets without large moons, like Mars.
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.
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?