NASA Releases Details of Titan Submarine Concept

Zothecula writes: Now that NASA has got the hang of planetary rovers, the space agency is looking at sending submarines into space around the year 2040. At the recent 2015 NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts Symposium, NASA scientists and engineers presented a study of the Titan Submarine Phase I Conceptual Design (PDF), which outlines a possible mission to Saturn's largest moon, Titan, where the unmanned submersible would explore the seas of liquid hydrocarbons at the Titanian poles.

"At its heart, the submarine would use a 1 kW radiothermal Stirling generator. This would not only provide power to propel the craft, but it would also keep the electronics from freezing. Unfortunately, Titan is so cold that it's almost a cryogenic environment, so the waste heat from the generator would cause the liquids around it to boil and this would need be taken into account when designing the sub to minimize interference. However, NASA estimates that the boat could do about one meter per second (3.6 km/h, 2.2 mph)."

Comments

Re:25 Years from now?

[Rei]

You joke, but the ability to reconfigure spacecraft on the fly even on the smaller scale has proven itself valuable time and time again. I love how they came up with a trick after New Horizons was launched to nearly double its communication rate. It has two radio transmitters, one primary and one backup, and one dish. When they launched, it seemed obvious that only one could be used at a time - but en route someone figured out that if you have one transmit with right-handed polarization and the other with left-handed, they can both transmit at the same time, and then on Earth the two signals can be separated out. But since the spacecraft wasn't designed for enough power to use them at once (that was never supposed to be necessary), they needed to find a trick to get more power. And it's not easy, given that there's not a lot of things running when the probe is just drifting in deep space - what are you going to do, shut down your guidance computer? Well... yes, that's exactly what they came up with - when they've filled up their memory, they align the antenna, then spin up the spacecraft, shut down the guidance computer, transmit at double speed until the memory is free, then restart guidance and stop the spin so that they can resume data collection.

While 3d printing and robotic arms for assembly is a stretch at present, the importance of having hardware flexibility is increasingly being demonstrated in space missions.