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I’ve read that drilling down to reach a potential liquid ocean to search for life would be a very difficult process and runs the risk of contaminating the envir
by Tagbert 3y ago
I’ve read that drilling down to reach a potential liquid ocean to search for life would be a very difficult process and runs the risk of contaminating the environment.
I wonder if we could eventually send down a robotic probe to the service to look for signs of life ejected by one of those plumes. It seems like the plumes would transport materials and maybe even microbes from deeper down. Before landing a sampler mission, we might start with a flyby that captures samples of the plume and looks for signs of life.
- tiberius_p 3y agoYou would need to be able to predict when and where these plumes will take place and then calculate the orbital maneuvers needed to intersect the spacecraft with those plumes. This will be very hard to achieve with a 1+ hour communication delay. Most likely you'll have to rely on some autonomous AI based on some sort of reinforcement learning algorithm. Also, orbital maneuvers that involve changing the orbital plane are very expensive in terms of fuel consumption. So first there will have to be an observation stage to determine which orbital plane is most likely to encounter a plume and then explore various orbit trajectories inside that plane until enough samples are collected.