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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.
People will stop fearing nuclear power when world leader stop making irresponsible remarks about nuking people when they are upset. Until then, anything with a rocket stage and a nuclear device in the payload will be taboo.
When you want unfounded pseudo-scientific shit posted to your website, look no further, ladies and gents. Clueless about technical details, uninformed on regulations, and without any scientific rigor, StartsWithABang has the posting balls to make even Bennett blush. A man who knows better than the experts in EVERY field, can armchair guide every research project without looking into what's going on, and can purely reckon his was to new findings that take mere normal scientists years to fully investigate, SWAB is the unthinking man's thinker.
I'm StartsWithABang, and I approve this and any other message that gets my medium.com blog noticed!
The amount of nuclear fuel they carry is not much, even if they are not on such missions as in comet landing, even if they eventually end up re-entering the atmosphere of planet earth, they can be designed to burn up and disperse. It is not going to add any more radioactive pollution than coal fired power plants. These coal plants burn so many thousands of tons, even trace radioactive elements measured in parts per billion eventually adds up to some serious numbers. Some burnt satellite is not going be significant.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
(The following assumes that politics was the cause of not using Pu-238...) The toxic stuff had a half-life of only 88 years, and was encased in another element? AND only a few grams were necessary to power it for the entire mission? I'd expect that kind of fear and ignorance from politicians, but project managers overseeing projects like this need to cut through that FUD with facts gleaned from their knowledgeable subordinates.
I guess that going green doesn't always lead to a green light of success at the end of the mission.
You still browse the web without javascript? What is this, 2005?
Worse, it's not even informed opinion. You can't just "slap an RTG" on a probe and hope for the best. There are engineering, cost, and benefits considerations to make.
I really feel like people forget that the lander was an afterthought. The primary science of the mission was and is being performed by the Rosetta spacecraft. It was a "nice to have" that everyone was thrilled to see work as well as it did but wasn't critical for the success of the mission. Furthermore, it performed the vast majority if it's planned science activities during the 60 hour battery period after initial landing.
Yes, obviously, probes and landers can and do outperform their initial program goals. But treating the lander like a failure when it was anything but is dishonest. Using it as a soapbox to push your agenda (whether it's one I agree with or not) is insulting to the 2000+ people who worked to make the mission the fabulous success that it is and was.
Have there been? 10,000 people die in Japan from a tsunami and everyone is still shitting their pants over a nuclear reactor that didn't kill anyone. People fear what they don't understand, and most of us aren't physicists.
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It would have been totally ludicrous to equip Philae with a RTG. This would have meant a dramatically increased cost for probably little gain. The main mission is the orbiter - it works fine with solar panels. The lander had an estimated failure probability of 50%, and that was an optimistic estimation. In the case it lands, the lander was equipped with a battery for the prime scientific objective. For the icing on the cake cheap solar panels were added.
So this guy suggests to spend hundreds(?) of thousand Euros just for the totally unlikely event that a) the lander lands correctly and b) the lander bounces and c) the lander lands again in a shadow for d) the icing on the cake? He does not seem to understand how budgeting works.
Use RTGs for deep space missions, where they are needed.
How can this ignorant (or simly troll?) be a "NASA columnist"?
First of all, the Rosetta mission was a joint NASA-ESA mission, where NASA was in charge of providing the power supply. However, the US Congress pulled the funding on the mission and ESA had to do it alone. This was after most of the spacecraft was already designed.
Second, ESA never developed nuclear-powered spacecraft. Even though it is a policy choice due to the fears of blowing up nuclear material in the atmosphere, it is also reflection of a space agency created specifically for non-military purposes. While NASA is also a civilian agency, it has a strong connection with the US military and access to materials such as plutonium.
Third, different Nuclear Power sources in Space (NPS) have to be developed in order to guarantee the availability of the raw material. There is no point in developing a long-term programme based on rare or very hard to obtain nuclear materials.
Fear is the mind-killer.
After Chernobyl we heard the same predictions, initially of "millions of excess deaths." Exactly the sort of handwavy pseudo-statistics the flat-earth lobby outgasses when it doesn't have any real science. But after all those yaers, the Chernobyl death toll remains stubbornly at 51.
But to stay on topic: supposedly the reason Philae did not have a radioisotope generator is that these are rather large, roughly the size and mass of a person. This would have been more useful for a long-endurance version of the Rosetta itself than a small lander probe.
Are you sure its radiation hasn't killed anyone? I've seen several "news" articles that claim a death toll of over 10,000 spread across the pacific, including thousands in California.
Sarcasm aside (and the above is true, in that those "articles" are floating out among fringe "environmentalist" sites), a HUGE part of the problem is in domestic nuclear industry that isn't replacing plants far past their operational lifetime with the newer and MUCH safer designs, since that would cost real money and the stockholders want that to be reexamined next quarter, after they sell. And short. Greed and stupidity on both sides...
But after all those yaers, the Chernobyl death toll remains stubbornly at 51.
Right, there's no way to accurately count the people who succumbed to various illnesses which wouldn't have killed them if not for its influence, so it's never going to be incremented substantially, but it will also never accurately reflect the impact of the Cherbobyl disaster.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
To answer this specific engineering problem, plutonium is simply too dangerous and costly to use in space. The reason is that plutonium is actually very safe to humans except when breathed in as small particles, such as what might be generated when a launch vehicles catastrophically explodes on launch. In this case, the small particles will tend to be inhaled by animals, pass through the lungs, and pretty permanently become part of the body. The plutonium will then go though the 24,000 half life, which means over the lifespan of the contaminated human almost no Pu will decay. It will radiate and cause health issue for a lifetime.
Again, this is an engineering problem with very smart people working it. All engineering problem result in an engineering solution, and an engineering solution is always a compromise between competing factors, some technical, some emotional.
In hind sight it is always easy to poo poo an engineering solution. People who do nothing but push paper, like the readers or forbes, are the most likely candidate is simply say 'why did we do this'. They can ask that question because they have never created a practical device in their lives, therefore never have been part of the engineering process and therefore have never understood that the result is always a less than perfect but usually quite acceptable solution.
While the nuclear power proponents want us to believe that nuclear power is the solution to everything, history tells us otherwise. Even though nuclear power is very mature technology, there is little private funding for it. In the US Nuclear power plants are not being build because bankers know there is no profit in it, and government should no more subsidize a nuclear power plant than a coal fired plant. Both are mature enough to stand on their own.
Nuclear power cannot stand on it's own because it cannot generate enough profit. For instance, BP generates enough profits so that when the Deep Horizon rig failed it could cover the 13 billion dollar clean up. Fukushima is going to cost 10 times that much to clean up. Who is going to pay for that. They taxpayer. The US taxpayer for contamination that reaches US land and water. It is true that the readers of Forbes loves to make profits at taxpayer expense, but I don't think that it is a good idea. It is only free if you are not the one impacted.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
That's a statistic I'd find hard to believe. And besides, immediate death is just a small part of it. There are a few hundred people that were in the Russian army at the time and had to respond to the disaster who have either died of various cancers or are suffering from them now. There are kids in Ukraine that are born with many genetic defects, like holes in their hearts, presumably because their parents were affected.
I wouldn't count this out as a negative effect. And these are obvious effects. How many people there suffer from lesser ilnesses that might or might not be attributed to Chernobyl, like stroke, cancers, etc.
I'm not opposed to nuclear. I think it needs to be a viable option if we are to stop producing CO2, but I won't pretend that it's harmless, either. Even if we get to a 100% safety record, there's still the matter of storage, and transporting that waste to the storage areas. How many TEPCOs do we need to realize many of these companies entrusted with the task can be very incompetent and borderline criminal in ignoring safety lapses pointed out by inspectors.
Not necessarily. Time won't solve basic physical limits. Chemical batteries, as most will know, have very limited lifetimes. The RTG on Voyager 1 has been going for more than 37 years. If you rule out radioactivity or nuclear power, then your only options in space are chemical or something like solar. Solar has problems, as Philae has demonstrated. The issue with chemical is that there are hard limits on how much energy you can store in the bonds between atoms - even if we invent a wonderful new rocket fuel or battery type, the maximum limits can still be worked out and they will never exceed that (there's a reason why we use ion engines for space probes, and it has to do with "mass you have to carry" and "how much it can change your speed"). "More technology" will never overcome these problems, unless you come up with something really exotic (like zero-point energy). One that is easy to understand is solar on Earth: we can make it more and more efficient, but we can never exceed 1kW/m^2, as this is the total amount of solar radiation reaching the surface (and, I don't think we've got better than about 30% efficiency). It doesn't matter how wonderful your technology gets, it can never beat basic physics.
The only "high-yield, low launch risk" technology I could think of would be fusion (as deuterium isn't radioactive), but we are yet to get that viable. Apart from that, you're dreaming of magic, no matter how much time you wait.
Love your explanation of why engineering problems are hard (everything is a compromise of something else, nothing is as simple as it first seems), although I disagree with you about nuclear power. Why should "how much money it makes" be the ruling metric? That's extremely foolish. Despite the high-profile cases, nuclear power is actually one of (if not the) safest forms of power generation. We are ruining people's health and the environment by using things like coal, so we need an alternative. So, nuclear power doesn't make lots of money - so what? If that's all we are measuring things by, then it explains why so many things are screwed up. Apply the same engineering thinking you explained to the performance metrics question: any single-metric performance measurement will be wrong ("good" overall is measured by a number of competing and sometimes conflicting factors; so, in your case "profitability" is a poor reason to say "nuclear isn't a solution").
The prevention and clean-up do need to be factored into the use of nuclear power, but we also need to drag the technology forward to safer designs, not keep limiting it to unsafe, inefficient forms that haven't changed in half a century.
I chalk up the deaths of Chernobyl less to nuclear power, and more to being the risks of living in a place like the Soviet Union. Yes, you can set off nuclear plants like that, but let's face it, Chernobyl was a triumph of Communist bureaucratic indifference at work.