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Draper Labs Develops Low Cost Probe To Orbit, Land On Europa For NASA
MarkWhittington writes Ever since the House passed a NASA spending bill that allocated $100 million for a probe to Jupiter's moon Europa, the space agency has been attempting to find a way to do such a mission on the cheap. The trick is that the mission has to cost less than $1 billion, a tall order for anything headed to the Outer Planets. According to a Wednesday story in the Atlantic, some researchers at Draper Labs have come up with a cheap way to do a Europa orbiter and land instruments on its icy surface.
The first stage is to orbit a cubesat, a tiny, coffee can sized satellite that would contain two highly accurate accelerometers that would go into orbit around Europa and measure its gravity field. In this way the location of Europa's subsurface oceans would be mapped. Indeed it is possible that the probe might find an opening through the ice crust to the ocean, warmed it is thought by tidal forces.
The second stage is to deploy even smaller probes called chipsats, tiny devices that contain sensors, a microchip, and an antenna. Hundreds of these probes, the size of human fingernails, would float down on Europa's atmosphere to be scattered about its surface. While some might be lost, enough will land over a wide enough area to do an extensive chemical analysis of the surface of Europa, which would then be transmitted to the cubesat mothership and then beamed to Earth.
The first stage is to orbit a cubesat, a tiny, coffee can sized satellite that would contain two highly accurate accelerometers that would go into orbit around Europa and measure its gravity field. In this way the location of Europa's subsurface oceans would be mapped. Indeed it is possible that the probe might find an opening through the ice crust to the ocean, warmed it is thought by tidal forces.
The second stage is to deploy even smaller probes called chipsats, tiny devices that contain sensors, a microchip, and an antenna. Hundreds of these probes, the size of human fingernails, would float down on Europa's atmosphere to be scattered about its surface. While some might be lost, enough will land over a wide enough area to do an extensive chemical analysis of the surface of Europa, which would then be transmitted to the cubesat mothership and then beamed to Earth.
Attempt no landings there!!!
Only mad men would attempt landings there
That's science right there - all our best evidence indicates that this can be feasible, and this seems the least effort to try it. Nice plan to at least see how far we can get, before we have to revise and replan. We're testing just the principles we want to test, using established functionality where we aren't testing.
That's far more 'magical' to me, than promising another set of boots in places that won't be feasible without exactly these kinds of experiments happening first. More rovers - more measurements!
When we need to spend the big resources to send people off this gravity well, lets have it make sense, perhaps set up a semblance of an workable environment first. We can barely make earth-based closed etiologies last for long - it would be a sad excuse for a 'backup' with our current level of development. We absolutely CAN expand into the galaxy/universe - but we've still got a few mountains of puzzle pieces left unsorted still, in my particular opinion.
Ryan Fenton
Nonesense. Add $100M to a $13T debt and you still have a $13T debt, it's a rounding error, a one off payment of 33 cents for every American.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Burn. Not only does exploring the universe develop innovation along the way of figuring out _how to explore the universe_, which can often be repurposed to impact individual's daily lives, but the possibilities of learning and expanding our fundamental knowledge of physics/etc by putting things on other planets and watching/analysing data is enormous. I repeat: BURN.
Cubesat-sized stuff is so small mostly because it tosses overboard redundancy and rad-hardened components.
While it may work for short times on Earth orbit, sending a mini probe like this all the way to Jupiter (a very hostile radiation environment if there ever was one) sounds like a good way of wasting a launcher to me.
Now if they'd toss half a dozen of these, I might buy it that one or two will get to Europa orbit and may actually do something useful.
Um, are we talking about the same Europa here? The one with the atmosphere that barely musters a nanotorr at the surface? The one where the terminal velocity of a scrap of mylar film is on the order of tens of kilometers per second? I think that "float down" plan may have been selected a bit hastily.
At least the chipsats turning into teeny little craters in the ice will reduce the data burden for the cubesat's transmitter, which based on those solar panels has a power budget of about a tenth of a watt to make a link at a range close to a billion kilometers. You can maybe squeeze a few hundred bits per second out of that while you're tying up a DSN dish, otherwise forget it.
Maybe they're thinking of making it an accessory to a full-size probe, but forgot to mention the need to send a few hundred kilograms of other stuff out there too. Or maybe somebody was behind on their press release quota, and this half-baked crap was the best thing they had lying around.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
This is a waste of money, regardless, but considering the economy, it isn't a responsible use of taxpayer dollars, either.
Right. Because science is always a bad investment.
We should spend taxpayer money in military so we can steal from the countries that do advance technologically? Or what's your master plan on how to stay among the first instead of plummeting to the group of those countries that mostly serve as factories for the more advanced.
" instead of plummeting to the group of those countries that mostly serve as factories for the more advanced."
Uh, have you seen our outsourcing numbers recently?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Since they do research for all mankind, but are mostly funded with American taxpayer dollars, they should start some kind of global donation program. I would love to chip in a bit for research like this. Maybe it will only bring in a few million dollars, which is peanuts compared to a billion dollars, but it could help the science cause anyway.
Why not just add the cubesat to SLS?
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Then what the hell are we waiting around for? If this is it, if this is the peak of human achievement, what a miserable peak it is. Let's just launch the nukes at one another and call it a day.
Good God. Trolls and Luddites.
Do you think Somalia outsurces much of it's manual labor to Norway?
It would obviously have to be before 2620. After then, Uranus will be renamed.
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it's a rounding error, a one off payment of 33 cents for every American.
That's what they said all of the other 130.000 times. That's why we need to make sure 100 millions worth of science is produced, in a sense that benefits a large number of citizens. Even pure expansion of knowledge is a valid benefit.
What you can't do is go around spending extracting cents out of your fellow citizens pockets on the presumption that they won't notice it. We have a democratic process that tries to weigh the interests and desires of all people; if you can't gather popular support for your project, you shouldn't do it with public money, with the very few exceptions such as defense and intelligence.
If this gets launched, it should be to "Europa - The Final Countdown". :P
Silence is a state of mime.
We've certainly left rovers and probes on other planets, and even intentionally crashed a couple on the moon. But raining hundreds of fingernail-sized chipsats on Europa kind of seems like cosmic littering. The debris from previous exploration missions have always felt large enough that we could go and pick it up if we were inclined (or capable) to do so. I know the truth is probably as bad or worse than this Europa mission, and I've probably subconsciously ignored that truth, but this just seems so willfully arrogant.
I feel like it plays into some of my worst fears about our species: arrogant, destructive, self-centered, lacking empathy, etc. As long as we exhibit those kinds of behaviors, we'll never get invited to the really good extra-terrestrial parties. You know, the ones where the all of the molecules of the hostess' undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left? Let's not do this mission. I want to go to that kind of party.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
And how will you power said cube sat and chip sats? You're way out at Jupiter, where sunlight is a bit scarce and you're in orbit around the planet, meaning what sunlight you have is not available for the entire orbit as you pass into eclipse. Oh, and you have to transmit the data with more than a few milliwatts of RF; you're way out at Jupiter, ~350M miles is close approach. It works in Earth's orbit because sunlight is much more intense and you only have to communicate over a few hundred miles distance.
Nanobots!
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
Yep. Big fail here.
"Hundreds of these probes, the size of human fingernails, would float down on Europa's atmosphere to be scattered about its surface."
Europa doesn't have an atmosphere.
Often this kind of thing is only a misunderstanding in the summary, but, no, checking the article, that's what it says.
Sorry, no.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Cool idea then, cool idea now.
It's not clear from the summary (or the linked article), but this isn't a mission at this point. This is a concept selected for Phase I study.
From the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) news release:
"NIAC Phase I awards are approximately $100,000, providing awardees the funding needed to conduct a nine-month initial definition and analysis study of their concepts. If the basic feasibility studies are successful, proposers can apply for Phase II awards, which provide up to $500,000 for two more years of concept development."
This effort is independent of the ongoing Europa mission studies (e.g. the Clipper concept.) The Draper concept may end up getting a mission if the results prove promising. Personally, I have doubts that this will prove credible, but that's the whole point of the NIAC studies.
But The Atlantic said "a small satellite about as large as a half-gallon of milk". I may be confused here, but at that ambient pressure, wouldn't that launched half-gallon of milk turn into a very much larger volume of water vapour, plus half a cup of freeze-dried milk solids? Just what would that volume be? Conversely, if it was a half-gallon at insertion, we're talking a fractional-droplet of milk at launch. So which is it?
Ya gotta love it when Americans try to talk down to each other about stuff that's already simple.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
I was thinking along the lines of a camera. Maybe get under funded 'KH Sat. and move it to Europa?
So... exactly why is it so "hard" to do this for under $1B? Launch costs are well known and are a small fraction of $1B. We have now sent dozens of probes to the planets so at the least the guidance and exterior should be well known. What else is left? Are instrumentation and mission support? Are we really needing to reinvent the wheel for each new mission? Is it that difficult to re-use (or at least upgrade) existing sensors and cameras?
All of this should be put out to worldwide bid.