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"Jupiter showers its moon Europa with enough radiation to kill a human in just a few days." Of course you'll freeze in a matter of minutes. Or suffocate in a m
by ant6n 11y ago
"Jupiter showers its moon Europa with enough radiation to kill a human in just a few days."
Of course you'll freeze in a matter of minutes. Or suffocate in a matter of seconds. Also, there's like nothing to eat.
Point is, probably the only place where you could built a viable habitation unit is below the ice anyway, where radiation is a bit less of a concern. And in any case, in space you have to protect against so many things that radiation may not add a lot of marginal complexity.
- iwwr 11y ago>Of course you'll freeze in a matter of minutes. Or suffocate in a matter of seconds. Also, there's like nothing to eat. The surface does have organic matter, together with rock mixed in with the ice, so there is potential for in-situ resource utilization to support human habitation.
- mapt 11y ago...Or it might be completely prohibitive, depending on what sort of radiation is present. High fluxes of low energy radiation are much easier to shield against than low fluxes of high energy radiation. This is incidentally why there is at present no realistic plan to deal with GCR's in interplanetary travel. Getting beneath Europa is a perfectly workable plan only if you assume that you can get to the Europan surface safely. It may be that just approaching it for landing gives too much dose for short-term survival. Absent good reason, though, Europa makes little sense for a manned mission relative to Ganymede or Callisto, which likely also have oceans, or Titan, which has an atmosphere to boot.
- ant6n 11y agoFair enough. It's just that 'kills you in days'-phrasing that sounds strangely ...not urgent, given the context of all the other things that'll kill you right away.