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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 refracti

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.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    That would be a lot of power required to prevent refreezing. If we're just throwing nonsensical ideas out, why not drop your probe down one of the geysers? Let the planet make the holes for you. You just need to make it so it doesn't get blown out each time the planet/moon sneezes. Of course, because I used the hand wavy word just means you automatically get to triple the cost estimate.
    - cookingmyserver 2y ago
      Would refreezing break the cable?
      - dylan604 2y ago
        If you build the probe so that it has the spool of cable in it, then the probe has to be as large as the full load of cable. If you make the probe just big enough to do what it needs while pulling the cable from the lander then it can be much smaller. If using the smaller probe, then the cable will need to be fully movable as it melts deeper. The larger probe with the full length of cable will require much more energy as it needs to melt a much larger hole. Where is all of this energy coming from?
        ceejayoz 2y ago
        > Where is all of this energy coming from? A nuclear reactor, probably.
        tagami 2y ago
- basementcat 2y ago
  You have to use more expensive radiation hardened fiber for Europa because the cheap stuff will literally go dark. It is likely there will also be a lower rate copper signaling path in case the umbilical tether is slightly damaged. Previous efforts to drill outside of Earth (mostly Mars) have proven difficult; there have been suggestions to instead "melt" through the ice with a radioisotope thermoelectric generator but this presents a different set of problems. Rest assured that incredibly smart people at a propulsion laboratory are working on solving these sorts of problems. If you are a citizen of the USA, you can help by asking your elected representatives to adequately fund these efforts so these personnel won’t be laid off in the next few months.
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.

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.
- dylan604 2y ago
  That would be a lot of power required to prevent refreezing. If we're just throwing nonsensical ideas out, why not drop your probe down one of the geysers? Let the planet make the holes for you. You just need to make it so it doesn't get blown out each time the planet/moon sneezes. Of course, because I used the hand wavy word just means you automatically get to triple the cost estimate.
  - cookingmyserver 2y ago
    Would refreezing break the cable?
    - dylan604 2y ago
      If you build the probe so that it has the spool of cable in it, then the probe has to be as large as the full load of cable. If you make the probe just big enough to do what it needs while pulling the cable from the lander then it can be much smaller. If using the smaller probe, then the cable will need to be fully movable as it melts deeper. The larger probe with the full length of cable will require much more energy as it needs to melt a much larger hole. Where is all of this energy coming from?
      - ceejayoz 2y ago
        > Where is all of this energy coming from? A nuclear reactor, probably.
        tagami 2y ago
basementcat 2y ago
You have to use more expensive radiation hardened fiber for Europa because the cheap stuff will literally go dark. It is likely there will also be a lower rate copper signaling path in case the umbilical tether is slightly damaged. Previous efforts to drill outside of Earth (mostly Mars) have proven difficult; there have been suggestions to instead "melt" through the ice with a radioisotope thermoelectric generator but this presents a different set of problems. Rest assured that incredibly smart people at a propulsion laboratory are working on solving these sorts of problems. If you are a citizen of the USA, you can help by asking your elected representatives to adequately fund these efforts so these personnel won’t be laid off in the next few months.

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.