Philae's Lost Seven Months Were Completely Unnecessary

StartsWithABang writes: This past weekend, the Philae lander reawakened after seven dormant months, the best outcome that mission scientists could've hoped for with the way the mission unfolded. But the first probe to softly land on a comet ever would never have needed to hibernate at all if we had simply built it with the nuclear power capabilities it should've had. The seven months of lost data were completely unnecessary, and resulted solely from the world's nuclear fears.

Comments

Not nuclear fear

[edxwelch]

Firstly, what caused the problem was not "Nuclear fear", but failure of the harpoon to hold Philea down. The solar panels would have worked fine otherwise.
Secoundly, Plutonium-238 is simply no longer available - nobody makes it anymore. The reason why is because it is created using a dangerous and expensive process by irradiation of neptunium-237.

Re:Not nuclear fear

[alexhs]

Plutonium-238 is simply no longer available - nobody makes it anymore.

That's pretty much what's in the article. The summary is inflammatory (on Slashdot ? Who would have guessed ?).
The meat of the argument is this :

1. All previous deep space probes have used RTGs [Radio-isotope Thermoelectric Generator], but the ESA has not developed RTG technology. They couldn’t get it from NASA (who wouldn’t provide it) or Roscosmos (which would violate the ITAR treaty).
2. We are literally running out of our Pu-238 supply for deep space missions. We are no longer making more, although we could be easily doing so for scientific purposes. It just costs a little bit of money.

So : side effects of nuclear regulations, and lack of material.
By the way, weight was not a reason, RTG weighting about the same as solar panels (12kg).

Re:HÃ?

[sjames]

What bollocks is that? What has an RTG in space to do with a nuclear (fission) reactor on earth?

Nevertheless, a bunch of fearful and uninformed people vigorously protested Cassini and it's RTG. Sky is falling, something something we're all going to die!

Re:Obligatory reading

[serviscope_minor]

And people go "oh no they can detect the radiation IN CALIFORNIA ITS LIKE THE TITANIC BUT WITH BEARS EVERYBODY PANIC!!11111ONE!11ONEoneleven1!11"

Which is actually a testament to the astonishing sensitivity of modern equipment. The level of radation in california is 8 disintegrations per cubic meter per second. That's 8 whole atoms per second in a tonne of water. That's 8 out of 100000000000000000000000000 atoms (that's actually the right number of zeros give or take).

It's also about an order of magnitude below the background radiation from naturally occuring stuff in the water, never mind the incoming cosmic rays and stuff from the ground and food.

Another fun fact: the Super-K detector can pick up the signature from relatively nearby nuclear submarines that aren't leaking any ionising radiation at all.

Instruments are sensitive.

Re:HÃ?

[Orgasmatron]

Yeah, that table is based on LNT, a "theory" with less supporting evidence than Santa Claus. Actually, that's not fair to Santa, since the evidence directly contradicts LNT. But LNT is mandated by law in many cases, which you should keep in mind the next time someone tells you that the left is pro-science.

LNT is "Linear, no threshold". According to that nonsense, a radiation dose expected to cause cancer in a person, but distributed over 7 billion people still causes 1 "extra" cancer in the world. This dose may not even be detectable, by the way, and would be far smaller than the ordinary background radiation levels.

In reality, people with occupational radiation doses have lower cancer rates than the general population.

Re:Obligatory reading

[whathappenedtomonday]

While it is true that people are not dropping dead in the thousands due to Fukushima, I'll leave this to consider:

Estimate of Consequences from the Fukushima Disaster, Jirina Vitazkova and Errico Cazzoli, Nordic PSA Conference (nuclear utilities in Finland and Sweden), September 2011 (emphasis added): The results with respect to health effects show that within 80 years the number of victims of the Fukushima disaster can be expected to be AT LEAST in the range of 10,000 to 300,000 people in terms of deaths due to infectious diseases, cardiovascular diseases, genetic diseases, and cancers; and about the same number of sicknesses/syndromes needing prolonged hospitalization and health care are expected to occur. This estimates accounts only for the population already living at the time of the accident. A comparable number of excess deaths and sicknesses may be expected in the population that will be born in the period. In addition to these, more than 100,000 excess still-births and a comparable or larger number of excess children born with genetic deformations (e.g. Down syndrome) are expected [...]

Whether the estimate is correct or not, it will take decades before it's safe to say "a nuclear reactor that didn't kill anyone". The actual outcome will also largely depend on how well the Japanese authorities will handle the cleanup. Judge for yourself whether they've done a good job so far.