Join the Efforts of a Manned Mission To Jovian Moon Europa

Kristian vonBengtson writes "Objective Europa aims to send human beings to Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, on a one way mission in search of extraterrestrial life while expanding the borders of exploration and knowledge for all mankind. The starting point of Objective Europa is purely theoretical (Phase I) but will move into more advanced phases including prototyping, technology try-outs, and eventually a crewed launch. Objective Europa is a crowd-researched project made up of an international team of volunteers. Many people from a wide range of backgrounds have already joined and become a vital part of the mission. ... [Europa's] deep ocean and active geology provide a solid platform for extraterrestrial life, making Europa one of the most enticing locations to explore in the solar system. The 600-day flight required to reach Europa is manageable with today's technology, and the many challenges of such a mission pose a perfect starting point for new research and innovative thinking."

Comments

FFS

[geek]

"Objective Europa aims to send human beings to Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, on a one way mission in search of extraterrestrial life"

Seriously, before you throw your lives away, at least get a minimal amount of evidence that life exists there. I'm sure lots of "special" people will apply for this but none of them will be the types we actually want going there.

Just send a fucking probe. Don't BE a probe.

Re:FFS

[Dr. Spork]

Yeah. By the time this mission could launch, our robots will actually be a lot more capable of doing useful research on Europa than the human settlers, especially when you control for all the mass that needs to be launched in order to keep people alive (and not crazy) for as long as this would take. Instead of people, why not send a nuclear submarine that could use its reactor to melt through all the ice and then navigate the sea beneath? If we have a chance of finding something cool, it will be down there.

Re:FFS

[Charliemopps]

There are conditions on Europa very similar to the conditions in certain places on earth that contain life. There are large chunks of shit that have been flying back and forth between there and here for billions of years. They've retrieved man made objects that have been in space for decades with bacteria on it that survived and re-animated after being thawed on earth. It would be more astonishing if there we didn't find life on Europa... and pretty much every other planetary body in our system.

Re:FFS

[The Grim Reefer]

i love how everyone assumes we're just going to jump on a rocket and head over there, you don't think probes will be sent initially? should we not plan beyond that?

Then why even bother sending people? If the probe doesn't find life are the people still going to go? What is the plan beyond sending some people to be cooked by Jupiter?

they're starting "phase 1" which is research and determining what tech we can use and what we still need to invent. seems to me that's pretty damn reasonable.

What the fuck is reasonable about it? What if a probe does find life. We're going to send a bunch of bacteria/virus laden meat-bags to contaminate the Europan (or is it European, damn that's going to be confusing) biosphere...

To die there. Just how much thought has been given to how this will affect any life that may be there? Part of me thinks the idea of going there would be pretty damn cool. But it's nothing but a childish way to get into the history books at best. At least go somewhere where there is some possibility of surviving.

The goal here seems to be go, plant flag, possibly destroy ecosystem, get in history books and die.

Re:FFS

[The Grim Reefer]

Well we could send all the telephone sanitisers, hairdressers, and advertising account executives. I would throw in the politicians and lawyers also, but that's just me.

I'd send the politicians and lawyers first. Advertising account executives and MBA's would be next. If that doesn't kill all life on Europa, then we should surrender to our new Jovian overlords.

Re:FFS

[Beardo the Bearded]

Yep, $25 application fee, get 100k applications, screen out all but 100 applicants, make them do some impossible tasks until they flunk, then oh well, you all fail.

Thanks for the moneeies.

Re:FFS

[jdschulteis]

If we go by Arthur C Clarke (and really, why shouldn't we?) it would be Europan which has a nice ring to it.

If we go by Arthur C. Clarke, we should attempt no landings there.

Re:FFS

[turbidostato]

"why not send a nuclear submarine that could use its reactor to melt through all the ice and then navigate the sea beneath?"

Because submarines' flying abilities, even when nuclear, compete in the same league as pigs.

Re:FFS

[Teancum]

Considering that Neil & Buzz landed on the Moon with only 8 seconds of fuel remaining in their landing engine, they came pretty close to becoming permanent residents on the Moon anyway... not to mention that the original landing site was horrible as well (Neil Armstrong deliberately avoided that spot and traveled a couple more miles down range for a better spot... hence why the fuel was so low). They were real engineering test pilots that day in July of 1969, which is part of why they deserved the recognition they got too.

It is also an example of why you don't want to have necessarily ordinary folks with no training or qualifications on a "first trip" to some place exotic like Europa. You can do that once the trip to that location is ordinary and boring.... sort of like the places Space Adventures sends people now. Sadly, customers for Space Adventures still need to spend six months at Star City in Russia before they go into space, but at least it is mostly ordinary (although rich) people who go.

Don't they know

[Anonymous Coward]

All these worlds are yours EXCEPT Europa.

Whyd do we need to send humans?

[TsuruchiBrian]

"Objective Europa aims to send human beings to Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, on a one way mission in search of extraterrestrial life while expanding the borders of exploration and knowledge for all mankind.

If you think it would be fun to go to Europa even if it means you will die there, that's totally something you should try to do. As for science and exploration, there is really nothing that a human being is going to be able to see or do, beyond what can be done by a robot.

Adding humans to a space mission just makes everything harder, because now you need to bring a whole bunch of shit like water, food, waste treatment machines, CO2 scrubbers, radiation protection, space suits, and extra rocket fuel to propel all this extra mass and even more rocket fuel to propel the extra rocket fuel. The only time when sending humans on a space trip would be beneficial to the human race at this point would be if the earth became full, and we needed to lower the population without killing people or sterilizing them.

Re:Whyd do we need to send humans?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Because they are orders of magnitude more productive.

The principal investigator for the Mars rovers said that if he were on Mars he could do in 45 seconds what the rovers do in a day.

Besides, visiting a foreign country is different from looking at it through a webcam. A robot probe is just an improvement over a telescope. Humans want to go to places.

What worries me is that the site has only one passing mention of radiation, for a mission to Jupiter orbit. Aren't humans in that region going to be almost literally fried?

Re:Whyd do we need to send humans?

[Dr. Spork]

So what's a human supposed to do on Europa? Operate a hammer and icepick? That doesn't sound very productive. That 45-second figure on Mars sounds hyperbolic, since on good days, the rovers can actually go pretty far and take lots of pictures.

But here's what I don't get about people who make comments like yours: Instead of looking at current missions and wishing that humans were there to do it better, why not instead ask what humans would do in space, and wish for (and design) machines that could do it as well. I mean, be concrete. For all the mission specific objectives (beyond: what happens to a person there?) that manned missions have - whether it's reconnaissance, construction, experimentation, etc. - I am pretty sure that it would be less expensive and less risky to make robots that could preform them equally well, less expensively and more safely. I think that's been the case since basically the Apollo era, when human lives were cheap and autonomous systems were miserable. That's the good reason why the Apollo era ended in 1972. The NASA home run of the 70's was the Voyager program. Then we pissed away the 80's shuttling people to LEO for no very good reason.

And if you compare the primitive rovers of today to manned missions, keep in mind also that the latter would be several orders of magnitude more expensive, and what amazing advances we could make if those budgets were going to robotics and autonomous systems. Maybe those robots really could do in 45 seconds what yesterday's rovers take a day to do. I mean, for fuck's sake. We have cars that can drive better than my mom.

Re:Whyd do we need to send humans?

[butalearner]

What worries me is that the site has only one passing mention of radiation, for a mission to Jupiter orbit. Aren't humans in that region going to be almost literally fried?

Wikipedia says there is enough radiation on the surface of Europa to kill a human in a single day (it's tidally locked with Jupiter, but I'm not sure if that helps the far side or not). I imagine they're headed to the subsurface ocean, if it exists, so they won't have to worry about it after they melt/drill their way through as many meters of ice as it takes (the Mars One site claims that five meters of Martian soil provides the same protection as Earth's atmosphere). But yeah, they'd definitely need to do something far more drastic than Mars One to protect the astronauts as they approach Europa until they land and get to a safe depth.

Re:Whyd do we need to send humans?

[TsuruchiBrian]

Of all the reasons I stated for why it was bad to send humans to Europa, the humans dying on Europa was not one of them. I don't even care if we send healthy people to Europa to die, if that's what they want to do.

What I am against, is pretending that this is necessary for scientific discovery or exploration. We can actually fit more and better scientific instruments on the spacecraft if we don't need to take any meat sacks and all the stuff required to have the survive the journey.

Re:Whyd do we need to send humans?

[TsuruchiBrian]

Because they are orders of magnitude more productive.

They also are orders of magnitude more difficult to get to mars or Europa healthy and stay that way for any length of time. If you could spend the same amount of money that a manned mission would cost on an unmanned mission, you could afford an order of magnitude more and better robots as well.

Besides, visiting a foreign country is different from looking at it through a webcam. A robot probe is just an improvement over a telescope. Humans want to go to places.

As I said, it's fine if you want to go to Europa and see it for yourself before dying. This doesn't help science at all. Having one person there doesn't magically make everyone else able to experience Europa. All the human can do is send back pictures and data just like a robot would. A robot isn't just a better telescope. A robot can use any instrument that a human could use.

Re:Whyd do we need to send humans?

[Graymalkin]

The principal investigator for the Mars rovers said that if he were on Mars he could do in 45 seconds what the rovers do in a day.

I think you're talking about Steve Squyers, the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover missions. He's a really smart guy and he's not wrong in his statement you're quoting. To wit, Apollo 17 astronauts collected about 110kg of lunar rocks during 22 total hours of EVA and drove a grand total of 36km while the Spirit rover only drove about 3.6km and examined (but did not collect) about 25 rocks over the course of 8 months.

However you simply cannot use this data to imply that humans sent into space are magically more productive than robotic probes. A field geologist would need to do a day's worth of work in 45 seconds on Mars because they would die of asphyxiation in about three minutes. To prevent that they would need to carry around their own oxygen. To keep it from floating free it would need to be contained in some sort of mask. The freezing temperatures would then kill that geologist within a few hours so instead of a mask they would need a whole insulated airtight suit. To keep from dying of dehydration within three days they would need water. Now that they would survive the night they would need food or else they would be ineffectual in their explorations after a few days and dead of starvation within a few weeks.

From there it only gets worse. In order to do really interesting work the field geologist would need some tools, not the least of which is a camera and a transceiver to talk back with Earth about their findings. To do anything more complicated would likely require more complicated tools. To keep these out of the elements (dust storms, intense UV radiation, Martian attack, etc) the field geologist would likely need some sort of habitat.

So really the field geologist needs literally tons of logistics behind them to do the work of an automated probe. That's a lot of non-mission specific mass to send to Mars just to support the single capable field geologist. With the extra mass comes expense and added complexity of the whole system.

Why not skip the extra bullshit and send more automated probes to Mars that were designed by an army of field geologists? You could send a dozen such missions for the same cost as a single manned mission and end up covering every major geologic region of the planet. You could also fill up its orbit with a squadron of multispectral imaging satellites that could relay data as well as collect their own.

I understand the desire to plant a human being on Mars but at the same time the pragmatic part of me interested in the actual science would rather see a dozen automated missions sent first. Putting inanimate objects in space is Hard, putting living things in space and getting them home still alive in Very Hard, putting people on the surface of other bodies is Extremely Hard, and putting people on the surface of other bodies having them do useful work while there is a damn moonshot (pun intended). Getting them home from said body is a "nice to have" and a minor miracle when it occurs.

Humans can be more effective in some places than robots but they're not necessarily more efficient than robots. If you've got limited will/funds the robot is usually the better option.

Re:Whyd do we need to send humans?

[Evil Pete]

The problem with sending people to Europa. Well problemS. In random order

• 1. This is Jupiter space. Heavy radiation levels, therefore heavy shielding on everything. Complicates everything.
• 2. How thick is the ice on Europa? 3 km, 5 km, 10 km? Good luck getting a submersible through that and back out again.
• 3. Two years there. Two years back. What is the likelihood of failure of components?

It is just so dodgy. I would love for humans to go to Europa, it would be amazing. But you have to be realistic. This not like a trip to the local shops to buy a litre of milk. It is across a good chunk of the solar system, a long way from help, in an environment that is totally inhospitable. No explorers before have had to face an environment as harsh as space. If a canoe split a leak, you could float to an island or whatever, live off the wildlife, catch fish. Not going to happen out there. A tiny crack in the hull and you are dead if it is not patched.

Verdict: scam.

Re:skeleton in an space suit

[Man On Pink Corner]

Exactly. I'd rather stay here, and live forever. Don't those morons know GTA5 just came out?

How is it throwing your life away?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

You can die in pain in dirty diapers in a nursing home, or you can die of radiation-induced cancer doing something that's never been done before and making historic discoveries. Either way is an equal level of deadness.

Re:How is it throwing your life away?

[mi]

With that said however, dead is dead no matter how it happened.

If it is the same to you, sir, I'd like my deadness to a) set as late as possible; b) be as painless as possible.

Neither objective is particularly achievable via a one-way travel to an icy rock.

Re:How is it throwing your life away?

[kermidge]

when i die, i'd like to go peacefully.
    in my sleep.
        like my grandfather.

not screaming,
    like the passengers in his car...

http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/93q1/carwreck.html

I first saw this circa 1990 in an excerpt from rec.humor.funny on GEnie. Netfunny is the Web version, posted by the original editor, Brad Templeton (interesting fellow, he); copyrights run from 1987-2008. I've tried to find the earliest version but with little success, since dates are not often given at the many sites of quotations a search returns. Of all the versions I've read, this one seems the best but it may simply be because it's the first one I saw, however the phrasing is the simplest, the arrangement the more effective.

Anyway, Europa seems a fine place to explore. The one-way "me, too" thing is so much horse apples; the crowd sourcing of research is novel to me. If humans go, unless it's part of a large expedition that's taking a five-year run or so at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn for example, wait for a decent fusion drive, stay under g, with a trip time of months not years - then come back. (And as for Mars One, I think the more difficult aspects will be production of food (Vegans aside, meat will be needed, earthworms and chickens, so take along a starter kit of Earth soils) and replacement parts. Likely gonna need some vitamins, although trace minerals ought to be available from the land.)

Re:I hope this fails

[viperidaenz]

It'll be fine, they'll be dead before the ship lands, so no one is going to open the door.

NASA knew there were radiation belts around Jupiter.
The Pioneer probes they sent were designed to handle a fair bit of radiation.
Pioneer 11 didn't directly pass through one, but lost most of the pictures it took of Io.

20 years later when they sent Galileo, it still suffered the effects of radiation, losing data.

NASA has already ruled out any possibility of a manned mission to Europa, because the radiation on that moon is impossible for a human to survive with current technology. Io, Europa and Ganymede are all too close.

Everyone wants to go to Europa though, because it has oxygen in its atmosphere and (frozen) water on its surface.

Re:Why do we need to send humans?

[Grog6]

Jupiter's radiation belts are pretty extreme; there's some info in the Galileo data. :)

We can't possibly carry enough shielding for the x-rays alone... and get there in a reasonable time.

A Jupiter mission will have to launch from Mars orbit, IMHO; unless we learn a new engine technology.

Although;
I still think we should send as many people to Mars as will go; I'm sure when the postcards about the Ham Bushes and Blanket trees come rolling in from Mars, and how we were completely mistaken on the whole there not being an Atmosphere thing, ticket sales will skyrocket!

Of course, we'll need lots of Security people and Politicians to go; we could build them special ships. :)

Who knew the actual Problem isn't popprob, it's PolProb.
.

Someone just watched Europa Report

[BobjoB]

So basically someone just saw Europa Report and decided to copy the entire movie premise. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2051879/

is this a joke?

[binarstu]

I looked around on the site a bit and watched the introductory video, and underneath the shiny veneer, there really is not much there. The video, for example, certainly looks pretty, but contains no useful information. Instead, it has a few amusing text bites, such as, "FAREWELL CREW... BEFORE YOU DIE... YOU MAY SHOW US LIFE". The whole thing seems a bit tongue-in-cheek. After seeing the site, I really wonder if it is a joke intended to point out how ridiculous the "one-way trip to Mars" plans are. I suspect the site is intended to drum up a lot of interest and volunteers (much like the call for Mars trip volunteers), so that the punchline can be delivered later when it is revealed that the whole thing is based on a completely silly proposition.

Or, perhaps I just hope that this is a joke and not for real...

Arthur C. Clark had something to say about this...

[techdavis]

"All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings there." (2010: Odyssey Two). Do we really want to tempt fate that way? Next thing you know, we'll have computers killing astronauts, Jupiter turning into a star... just too risky ;)

Re:If I wanted to live in an icy wasteland...

[SteveFoerster]

Nah, it just wouldn't be the same. Greenland doesn't have enough radioactivity and it has way too much air.

Radiation

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

It turns out that others have done some real work on this. There may be on the order of a meter of regolith which could be heaped on a shelter much faster than one could burrow into the ice. The leading hemisphere gets less radiation than the trailing hemisphere. I personally would look into a long deployable loop of superconductor to provide a pocket magnetosphere.

Unfortunately, the number that all those measures are chipping away at is one lethal dose per day. Add in the exposure while getting there in the first place. Lifting enough radiation shielding is probably out of the question for anything short of Orion. Maybe launch from a moon base with a bunch of lunar soil? Intercept a crumbly asteroid and mine it for shielding?

The "why send humans" posts...

[rabbin]

There is an alarmingly widespread mindset on slashdot that seems to suggest that every action taken by humans must be solely motivated by improving the "success" of our species (where "success" is resource acquisition, improvements in technology, whatever else increases the expanse and longevity of our species), as if we're in some galaxy-wide race to proliferate ourselves. But increasing the expanse and longevity of humanity does not necessarily mean we will be happy (the only thing which humans truly seek to maximize, even if we're quite often ineffectual at doing so). It only has the *potential* to create a condition for it, and while it is certainly a worthy pursuit for this reason, to make it one's sole pursuit (or even something close to it) is absolute insanity (as one never stops to do that which makes them happy). Life is not a fucking RTS.

So when we talk of sending humans to europa or mars, there is no miscalculation about e.g. the inefficiency of using a human body in those environments when compared to that of a robot. The fact is that sending humans is *the entire point of it*. We want to observe the *human experience*--it is the next best thing to experiencing it ourselves (humans have this wonderful thing called empathy, the ability to (approximately) experience something through another ... well, most humans do). The satisfaction of curiosity, the overcoming of all of the challenges and risks, the feeling of being on the frontier of human exploration, etc etc all experienced through another--this is why we want to send humans. In other words, there is no reason other than the most fundamental which humans possess (it makes us happy) and there is nothing as sufficient--it is what people live for.

Now perhaps this "human experience" and "empathy" stuff doesn't matter to you (given that you're reading this I suspect you're lying or in denial, but so be it), or perhaps you really don't think the costs/risks are worth it (i.e. you don't think it will make you happy). Fine then, don't support the effort and move along. Just don't try to claim there is some sort of objective foolishness to sending humans instead of robots, as that simply means you have a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and why so many want to send humans in the first place (and I could understand why one would be upset with NASA or other taxpayer funded efforts using humans for this purpose, but in that context you have your vote).