7 ms·

I find Europa fascinating but unfortunately I think the lack of missions is less about interest and more about feasibility. On earth we rarely drill more than 2

I find Europa fascinating but unfortunately I think the lack of missions is less about interest and more about feasibility. On earth we rarely drill more than 2-3km down. The Russians did 12km once in Antarctica. With Europa we are looking at 20km+ of multiple layers of exotic Europan ice with composition and properties we know very little about, have zero experience with. Not to mention the immense distance, time lags and hostility of the environment. Drilling on earth is dangerous and difficult and failure prone as it is. How do we learn to do this? How many missions and failures are required?

ceejayoz 2y ago
> With Europa we are looking at 20km+ of multiple layers of exotic Europan ice with composition and properties we know very little about, have zero experience with. I mean, that's why we go. Clipper is going to figure out, in part, whether we actually need to go down 20km or if we can just scoop up stuff kicked by cryovulcanism into low orbit. https://www.nasa.gov/missions/are-water-plumes-spraying-from-europa-nasas-europa-clipper-is-on-the-case/ https://www.nasa.gov/missions/are-water-plumes-spraying-from...
jvanderbot 2y ago
The value from a surface probe that can sample those brown stains is immeasurable. Imagine an HD video of the guysers, or an imaging spectrometer using refraction from the sun through a guyser (or whatever I'm not a scientist) and picking up strange amounts of something that can't be explained by just water and salt. Or even a detailed radar scan of the subsurface - are there pockets of warm water? Limiting probes to only those that can get through 10s of kms of ice is short-sighted.
- safety1st 2y ago
  Yeah I think a mission to see whether we can scoop up stuff that's been blasted up to the surface or even into orbit (and probably picking up some data on the ice crust along the way) is a lot more promising. Just saying, there are people in these comments observing that "you can buy a 25km fiber cable online" lol... I love the exuberance but people may not be fully grokking the scope of the engineering problem here :) every mission comes at the expense of other possible missions, and drilling 25km down into Europa could easily be a feat that we would fail to accomplish even with 5 or 10 missions. There are challenges we will not surmount in our lifetimes, and this might be one of them. Deep drilling is dramatically harder than your average HN user probably realizes... exuberance alone cannot conquer physics.
  - chefandy 2y ago
    Well, what good is a naive misgiving if you don't even use it to haughtily dismiss genuine expertise? I can't tell you how many times I've had developers essentially manaplain my non-dev fields of expertise to me knowing that I was a credentialed professional and they were making stab-in-the-dark assumptions. Phrases like, "theoretically, it should be very simple," should usually be replaced by, "It would be ridiculous to assume everything I don't know about this is inconsequential, but here are some baselessly confident words about it:".
    - potato3732842 2y ago
      What good is a professional credential if you don't use it as an appeal to authority to shut down any criticism of your opinions? /s On a more serious note, it's a travesty that lawyers get all the hate and PEs get none.
    - eldaisfish 2y ago
      add to this the constant claims in the field of renewable energy and the energy transition. I've heard "energy storage is a solved problem" so many times that i cannot help but laugh. Code & techbros are not the solution to everything.
      - chefandy 2y ago
        Then, some will dust off that Larry Wall quote about hubris as if it's exculpatory... Well, I read that book too, and he was definitely talking about problem-solving approaches in software development, and not general-purpose personality traits for software developers.
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    If it truly is just ice it would likely be more effective to melt through and spool out power/comms behind it (think TOW missile) rather than drill through. Carrying spare energy is a less thorny problem than all the (literal) moving parts required to autonomously drill a few miles in the outer solar system.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  "Immeasurable" and "large" are not synonyms. I agree with you that it's immeasurable, but I disagree that it's large. It's likely that nothing is going to change if we know what those brown spots are today or if we know in 10-20 years. Sure, there will be some cool "I fucking love science" photos that come out of this, but if that's the "immeasurable" value you are anticipating, I would give that a value of less than $1 million.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    If your claim is that it'd not be worth it to pay two million dollars for a surface lander that successfully samples and conducts experiments on Europa's ice in situ, returns HD video, etc, then I can't really agree with you or even see how we would reach agreement. A Europa lander was at least considered as a viable billion dollar mission when I left JPL. If that's not your claim then I don't understand your valuation and the rest of the comment doesn't track. And not to engage at a base level but my use of immeasurable is correct in being interpreted as "large" unambiguously, at least by Merriam webster.
    - pclmulqdq 2y ago
      My claim is that the pictures themselves are probably only worth $100k or so, and you can read the comment again to see how that tracks semantically. The experiments, maybe ten million unless they can demonstrate that they have some sort of value. A "viable billion dollar mission" includes all sorts of other things that are of value, including developing capabilities to do things that are strategically important, which I would claim is where a large majority of that billion dollars comes from. Similarly, I would expect that JPL would very much inflate the value of their own work. Everyone does. Also, I see "incapable of being measured" with "broadly : indefinitely extensive" tacked on in the MW definition. There is no requirement there that "immeasurable" mean "large", just "incapable of being measured" with the expectation that it is used when describing things that are extreme. My most recent use of "immeasurable" was "immeasurably small" which I'm sure you would agree is a proper use.
m4rtink 2y ago
The record setting Kola Superdeep Borehole is no it Antarctica but close to the northern polar cycle on the northern edge of Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole They did some drilling to the Ice at the Antarctica Vostok station, going donw to about 3 km: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_Station#Ice_core_drilling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_Station#Ice_core_drilli...
- knodi123 2y ago
  Did they do it with a remotely operated probe that can't be repaired or assisted?
ggambetta 2y ago
We send Bruce Willis and a ragtag team of lovable, drilling-expert misfits?
- MichaelNolan 2y ago
  > I asked Michael [Bay] why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers, and he told me to shut the fuck up. — Ben Affleck Still one of my favorite movies though.
  - photonthug 2y ago
    Although.. in defense of that mythical blue collar work ethic, I do know plumbers and machinists that have built their own planes and become aviators. Never met a test pilot or double-phd that become a plumber
    - knodi123 2y ago
      > Never met a test pilot or double-phd that become a plumber Yeah, but if one of them had, he'd probably be too embarrassed to tell you!
    - jogjayr 2y ago
      You always need a license to fly your own plane. You don't always need a license to do your own plumbing. There might be many test pilots or double-phds fixing the plumbing on their houses without telling anyone.
moffkalast 2y ago
There are certain things we can do on a afaraway planet and not at home, such as using an unshielded RTG to melt the ice with exposed plutonium. and just unrolling a cable while the probe sinks down like a torpedo. Assuming it's all ice and not rock after 20 meters down...
- protomolecule 2y ago
  The liquid will freeze back behind the probe.
  - cookingmyserver 2y ago
    Correct, hence the need for the probe to unroll the cable as it goes down. If you had the roll on the surface, you would need to heat the whole cable to allow it to slip down.
    - protomolecule 2y ago
      Which would require much more power than a single RITEG.
      - arethuza 2y ago
        Why - 25km of fibre isn't that large?
        jdiez17 2y ago
        Back of the envelope feasibility check: assume the cable is a cylinder with diameter = 1cm, length = 25km. The area of the cylinder face is A = 2*pi*r*h = 785.4 m^2. The thermal conductivity of water ice is approx. 2.3 W / (m K). So to maintain a temperature difference of 10 K with the ice, you need 2.3 W/mK * 785 * 10 = approximately 18kW.
        arethuza 2y ago
flatline 2y ago
It sounds like we don’t know enough to even consider landing a probe, let alone something completely unprecedented like drilling a deep hole. This mission, if I understand the article, will attempt to determine the depth of the surface, its constituency, and possibly the constituency of what’s below it. It may be that Europa is not geothermally active as we hope, and is made up entirely of ice and other simple inorganic compounds. That would likely shift our efforts to other, more promising targets of exploration in the solar system. Drilling is many steps ahead of where we are at.
maitola 2y ago
Researchers are not sure about the thickness of the ice on Europa. Some scientists believe on a thick shell of 20Km (like Pappalardo) others on a much thinner of even 1Km or less.
nsxwolf 2y ago
That’s what nukes are for yeah? You just let it melt its way down
- jopsen 2y ago
  My initial thought too, but on the odd chance there is life -- we might not want to come knocking that way :)
atomicnumber3 2y ago
I wish more people were passionate about space, and we had more funding available. Because you list all these difficulties and I just think "well we better get started! Who do I vote for so we can get started?"
BurningFrog 2y ago
If there is life in the ocean, I think there should be life signs in the surface ice.
- NegativeLatency 2y ago
  Do the deep sea extremophiles on earth leave visible signs on the surface?
  - BurningFrog 2y ago
    I don't know. I expect there is some organic material in the polar ice fields?
eru 2y ago
> The Russians did 12km once in Antarctica. You mean in the Arctic? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
- dghughes 2y ago
  They probably meant Vostok in the Antarctic Russians drilled a 3,720m deep hole in ice. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/annals-of-glaciology/article/deep-drilling-at-vostok-station-antarctica-history-and-recent-events/8DA18E684DD19E80E7D02F2FBD2DFA26 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/annals-of-glaciology...
  - eru 2y ago
    Interesting! So probably a mix-up.
jancsika 2y ago
I just imagine you saying this to a group of frustrated NASA engineers, then seeing a hard cut to a bunch of rough necks chasing each other around on an oil rig.
- jeremyjh 2y ago
  Yes it would be that easy in Hollywood. I’d be willing to bet my entire net worth that even 200 years from now it will still seem absurd to put a drilling rig with multiple living humans onto Europa. Too bad I have no way to collect, much less say “I told you so.”
  - eMPee584 2y ago
    finally, a valid use case for the block chain.. long future bets
wileydragonfly 2y ago
The fuck else we gonna spend money on? Tamagotchis?
augusto-moura 2y ago
It is true that it is a lot of unknowns while drilling in Europa. But, the biggest problem with drilling on earth is the heat from the core itself, which we don't have on Europa (or Mars for the matte). Other problems like structural resistance and heavy equipment management can also be a lot easier in low gravity, although much of drilling on earth benefits from gravity "pulling" the drill. I know this because I was always interested in the possibility of deep mining operations in other planets, and did some research on it. There are a few interesting things we can achieve with deep mines in other planets: - Preserving resources and nature on earth. Mining is quite disruptive to the ecosystem and other planets are abundant with common minerals, like iron, cobalt, gold and silicates. - Underground bases might be easiest and simpler way of building any settlements on other planets, removing material can be done in-situ without need send as much construction materials. It gives great protection against radiation, good insulation agains temperature changes, and can be pressurized to Earth's atmosphere. - It gives access to materials only found deeper in the crust. And different planets might have different mineral deposits - This is not practical, but also interesting, you could technically dig deep enough to have enough air pressure in a open cave to not need a pressurized suit. In Mars that would be around 20 km, a much more comfortable atmospheric pressure would be found around 40km though.
TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
Well, good thing the probe is doing none of that! The mission is: > 50 ice-skimming flybys, remotely probing the ocean in hopes of finding a chemistry that could support life.

ceejayoz 2y ago

> With Europa we are looking at 20km+ of multiple layers of exotic Europan ice with composition and properties we know very little about, have zero experience with. I mean, that's why we go. Clipper is going to figure out, in part, whether we actually need to go down 20km or if we can just scoop up stuff kicked by cryovulcanism into low orbit. https://www.nasa.gov/missions/are-water-plumes-spraying-from-europa-nasas-europa-clipper-is-on-the-case/ https://www.nasa.gov/missions/are-water-plumes-spraying-from...

jvanderbot 2y ago

The value from a surface probe that can sample those brown stains is immeasurable. Imagine an HD video of the guysers, or an imaging spectrometer using refraction from the sun through a guyser (or whatever I'm not a scientist) and picking up strange amounts of something that can't be explained by just water and salt. Or even a detailed radar scan of the subsurface - are there pockets of warm water? Limiting probes to only those that can get through 10s of kms of ice is short-sighted.

safety1st 2y ago
Yeah I think a mission to see whether we can scoop up stuff that's been blasted up to the surface or even into orbit (and probably picking up some data on the ice crust along the way) is a lot more promising. Just saying, there are people in these comments observing that "you can buy a 25km fiber cable online" lol... I love the exuberance but people may not be fully grokking the scope of the engineering problem here :) every mission comes at the expense of other possible missions, and drilling 25km down into Europa could easily be a feat that we would fail to accomplish even with 5 or 10 missions. There are challenges we will not surmount in our lifetimes, and this might be one of them. Deep drilling is dramatically harder than your average HN user probably realizes... exuberance alone cannot conquer physics.
- chefandy 2y ago
  Well, what good is a naive misgiving if you don't even use it to haughtily dismiss genuine expertise? I can't tell you how many times I've had developers essentially manaplain my non-dev fields of expertise to me knowing that I was a credentialed professional and they were making stab-in-the-dark assumptions. Phrases like, "theoretically, it should be very simple," should usually be replaced by, "It would be ridiculous to assume everything I don't know about this is inconsequential, but here are some baselessly confident words about it:".
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    What good is a professional credential if you don't use it as an appeal to authority to shut down any criticism of your opinions? /s On a more serious note, it's a travesty that lawyers get all the hate and PEs get none.
  - eldaisfish 2y ago
    add to this the constant claims in the field of renewable energy and the energy transition. I've heard "energy storage is a solved problem" so many times that i cannot help but laugh. Code & techbros are not the solution to everything.
    - chefandy 2y ago
      Then, some will dust off that Larry Wall quote about hubris as if it's exculpatory... Well, I read that book too, and he was definitely talking about problem-solving approaches in software development, and not general-purpose personality traits for software developers.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  If it truly is just ice it would likely be more effective to melt through and spool out power/comms behind it (think TOW missile) rather than drill through. Carrying spare energy is a less thorny problem than all the (literal) moving parts required to autonomously drill a few miles in the outer solar system.
pclmulqdq 2y ago
"Immeasurable" and "large" are not synonyms. I agree with you that it's immeasurable, but I disagree that it's large. It's likely that nothing is going to change if we know what those brown spots are today or if we know in 10-20 years. Sure, there will be some cool "I fucking love science" photos that come out of this, but if that's the "immeasurable" value you are anticipating, I would give that a value of less than $1 million.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  If your claim is that it'd not be worth it to pay two million dollars for a surface lander that successfully samples and conducts experiments on Europa's ice in situ, returns HD video, etc, then I can't really agree with you or even see how we would reach agreement. A Europa lander was at least considered as a viable billion dollar mission when I left JPL. If that's not your claim then I don't understand your valuation and the rest of the comment doesn't track. And not to engage at a base level but my use of immeasurable is correct in being interpreted as "large" unambiguously, at least by Merriam webster.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    My claim is that the pictures themselves are probably only worth $100k or so, and you can read the comment again to see how that tracks semantically. The experiments, maybe ten million unless they can demonstrate that they have some sort of value. A "viable billion dollar mission" includes all sorts of other things that are of value, including developing capabilities to do things that are strategically important, which I would claim is where a large majority of that billion dollars comes from. Similarly, I would expect that JPL would very much inflate the value of their own work. Everyone does. Also, I see "incapable of being measured" with "broadly : indefinitely extensive" tacked on in the MW definition. There is no requirement there that "immeasurable" mean "large", just "incapable of being measured" with the expectation that it is used when describing things that are extreme. My most recent use of "immeasurable" was "immeasurably small" which I'm sure you would agree is a proper use.

m4rtink 2y ago

The record setting Kola Superdeep Borehole is no it Antarctica but close to the northern polar cycle on the northern edge of Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole They did some drilling to the Ice at the Antarctica Vostok station, going donw to about 3 km: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_Station#Ice_core_drilling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_Station#Ice_core_drilli...

knodi123 2y ago
Did they do it with a remotely operated probe that can't be repaired or assisted?

ggambetta 2y ago

We send Bruce Willis and a ragtag team of lovable, drilling-expert misfits?

MichaelNolan 2y ago
> I asked Michael [Bay] why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers, and he told me to shut the fuck up. — Ben Affleck Still one of my favorite movies though.
- photonthug 2y ago
  Although.. in defense of that mythical blue collar work ethic, I do know plumbers and machinists that have built their own planes and become aviators. Never met a test pilot or double-phd that become a plumber
  - knodi123 2y ago
    > Never met a test pilot or double-phd that become a plumber Yeah, but if one of them had, he'd probably be too embarrassed to tell you!
  - jogjayr 2y ago
    You always need a license to fly your own plane. You don't always need a license to do your own plumbing. There might be many test pilots or double-phds fixing the plumbing on their houses without telling anyone.

moffkalast 2y ago

There are certain things we can do on a afaraway planet and not at home, such as using an unshielded RTG to melt the ice with exposed plutonium. and just unrolling a cable while the probe sinks down like a torpedo. Assuming it's all ice and not rock after 20 meters down...

protomolecule 2y ago
The liquid will freeze back behind the probe.
- cookingmyserver 2y ago
  Correct, hence the need for the probe to unroll the cable as it goes down. If you had the roll on the surface, you would need to heat the whole cable to allow it to slip down.
  - protomolecule 2y ago
    Which would require much more power than a single RITEG.
    - arethuza 2y ago
      Why - 25km of fibre isn't that large?
      - jdiez17 2y ago
        Back of the envelope feasibility check: assume the cable is a cylinder with diameter = 1cm, length = 25km. The area of the cylinder face is A = 2*pi*r*h = 785.4 m^2. The thermal conductivity of water ice is approx. 2.3 W / (m K). So to maintain a temperature difference of 10 K with the ice, you need 2.3 W/mK * 785 * 10 = approximately 18kW.
        arethuza 2y ago

flatline 2y ago

It sounds like we don’t know enough to even consider landing a probe, let alone something completely unprecedented like drilling a deep hole. This mission, if I understand the article, will attempt to determine the depth of the surface, its constituency, and possibly the constituency of what’s below it. It may be that Europa is not geothermally active as we hope, and is made up entirely of ice and other simple inorganic compounds. That would likely shift our efforts to other, more promising targets of exploration in the solar system. Drilling is many steps ahead of where we are at.

maitola 2y ago

Researchers are not sure about the thickness of the ice on Europa. Some scientists believe on a thick shell of 20Km (like Pappalardo) others on a much thinner of even 1Km or less.

nsxwolf 2y ago

That’s what nukes are for yeah? You just let it melt its way down

jopsen 2y ago
My initial thought too, but on the odd chance there is life -- we might not want to come knocking that way :)

atomicnumber3 2y ago

I wish more people were passionate about space, and we had more funding available. Because you list all these difficulties and I just think "well we better get started! Who do I vote for so we can get started?"

BurningFrog 2y ago

If there is life in the ocean, I think there should be life signs in the surface ice.

NegativeLatency 2y ago
Do the deep sea extremophiles on earth leave visible signs on the surface?
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  I don't know. I expect there is some organic material in the polar ice fields?

eru 2y ago

> The Russians did 12km once in Antarctica. You mean in the Arctic? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole

dghughes 2y ago
They probably meant Vostok in the Antarctic Russians drilled a 3,720m deep hole in ice. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/annals-of-glaciology/article/deep-drilling-at-vostok-station-antarctica-history-and-recent-events/8DA18E684DD19E80E7D02F2FBD2DFA26 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/annals-of-glaciology...
- eru 2y ago
  Interesting! So probably a mix-up.

jancsika 2y ago

I just imagine you saying this to a group of frustrated NASA engineers, then seeing a hard cut to a bunch of rough necks chasing each other around on an oil rig.

jeremyjh 2y ago
Yes it would be that easy in Hollywood. I’d be willing to bet my entire net worth that even 200 years from now it will still seem absurd to put a drilling rig with multiple living humans onto Europa. Too bad I have no way to collect, much less say “I told you so.”
- eMPee584 2y ago
  finally, a valid use case for the block chain.. long future bets

wileydragonfly 2y ago

The fuck else we gonna spend money on? Tamagotchis?

augusto-moura 2y ago

It is true that it is a lot of unknowns while drilling in Europa. But, the biggest problem with drilling on earth is the heat from the core itself, which we don't have on Europa (or Mars for the matte). Other problems like structural resistance and heavy equipment management can also be a lot easier in low gravity, although much of drilling on earth benefits from gravity "pulling" the drill. I know this because I was always interested in the possibility of deep mining operations in other planets, and did some research on it. There are a few interesting things we can achieve with deep mines in other planets: - Preserving resources and nature on earth. Mining is quite disruptive to the ecosystem and other planets are abundant with common minerals, like iron, cobalt, gold and silicates. - Underground bases might be easiest and simpler way of building any settlements on other planets, removing material can be done in-situ without need send as much construction materials. It gives great protection against radiation, good insulation agains temperature changes, and can be pressurized to Earth's atmosphere. - It gives access to materials only found deeper in the crust. And different planets might have different mineral deposits - This is not practical, but also interesting, you could technically dig deep enough to have enough air pressure in a open cave to not need a pressurized suit. In Mars that would be around 20 km, a much more comfortable atmospheric pressure would be found around 40km though.

TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago

Well, good thing the probe is doing none of that! The mission is: > 50 ice-skimming flybys, remotely probing the ocean in hopes of finding a chemistry that could support life.