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All Systems Go for NASA's Mission to Jupiter Moon Europa
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoThis is great news. I can't wait for this mission. > If proven to exist, this global ocean could hold more than twice as much water as Earth. I really wish we were past the "is there water there" stage and onto the "Lets drop a submarine and see what's down there" stage. I imagine getting through 15 miles of ice might be a wee challenging.
- waterlesscloud 11y agoPlans exist. Here's one for a submarine on Titan - https://www.nasa.gov/content/titan-submarine-exploring-the-depths-of-kraken/#.VYMRb3XN-00 https://www.nasa.gov/content/titan-submarine-exploring-the-d... There was another Titan boat proposal a couple years ago, but it lost NASA's internal funding battles to Yet Another Mars Lander. http://www.universetoday.com/96924/mars-lander-wins-out-for-2016-mission-over-titan-boat-and-comet-hopper/ http://www.universetoday.com/96924/mars-lander-wins-out-for-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Mare_Explorer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Mare_Explorer
- Caprinicus 11y agoMars is easily the lamest planet in the solar system. I don't understand why we need to keep going there.
- devindotcom 11y agoThousands of experts disagree?
- clarky07 11y agoby being "lamest" it is most reasonable for humans to go to, and most likely to actually be useful to us.
- kenrikm 11y agoBecause there is actually a chance people could live there for extended periods of time.
- meatysnapper 11y agoMars is the Ohio of the Solar System. Important for political purposes, but otherwise boring and unfulfilling.
- magicalist 11y agoJust to be clear, the Titan "boat" was really a buoy. It would have dropped into a lake and drifted. That still would have been amazing (imagine video from a lake on another world!), but the science would have been limited by the cost of dealing with the environment and the tight budget of the Discovery program. The biggest issue, however, was the problematic development of the needed power supply[1]. There is another option for these missions, of course. A nominal increase in NASA funding to increase the number of missions we can fly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Stirling_radioisotope_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Stirling_radioisotope...
- waterlesscloud 11y agoEven these "cheap" missions are a half billion each, so it's a little more than nominal. Choices have to be made, even if NASA's budget was doubled. TiME was always a longshot proprosal, but I'd personally rather see the lower budget Discovery Program missions doing riskier stuff. And while I love a good Mars mission, Mars gets all the marquee missions anyway. It's kind of a shame to see it eat the resources of the lesser missions too.
- magicalist 11y ago> Even these "cheap" missions are a half billion each, so it's a little more than nominal over a decade or more, though :) I just wish we could have more.
- jdhawk 11y agoI know there is a very good reason for this, but it seems like we're sending a lot of satellites to these moons and planets to perform VERY similar missions. Orbit around, take photos and readings. Why are we creating a new spacecraft every time this happens? Why are they not "mass producing" the same generic exploration sat, with a generally useful set of features, then slightly modifying it for any specifics? Launch in 2020's? snooze. Just launch the same sat from the last mission and start getting data now.
- devindotcom 11y agoBoy, where to start. First of all the conditions around various planets and bodies are very different. Jupiter for example is oozing with ugly radiation so we can't just put a "stock" probe into orbit around Europa, it would fry. Second, these missions aren't actually that frequent. It takes months or years for a spacecraft to arrive at its destination, and its design had to be finalized and tested rigorously years before its launch. That means by the time we even get a close up picture of Ceres, for example, the science of spacecraft building will have advanced by several years and we now can include new sensors and improve fuel efficiency and so on. Third, what do you think science is? Taking photos and readings. That is a huge, huge part of basic science, especially when it comes to astrophysics, astrogeology, astrochemistry, and so on. Landing on a planet provides further opportunities to take photos and readings, but it's phenomenally difficult to do. Finally, if you are bored by cutting-edge space travel and the study of distant worlds that may hold the possibility of life... I don't even know. I'm mystified by your perspective on the universe we live in.
- Achshar 11y agoBut what's stopping us from making exact copies of this probe/sat (say... 10) and launching them all at once? Or at an interval of say 6 months a piece? That way we will have low cost since the r&d will be basically 0 for all the extra models and we get 10x the data and larger time span of coverage. Plus we won't be putting all our eggs in the same basket.
- 11y ago
- ForHackernews 11y ago> I imagine getting through 15 miles of ice might be a wee challenging. Just drop a nuclear probe that can melt through: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3548139.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3548139.stm
- Caprinicus 11y agoSometimes I feel like the aerospace industry is in a race to make the most phallic objects possible. I wonder how hard it is to get a signal through all the ice.
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoThere's one design that's a very effective perpetrator. Works in biology; works in space.
- pavel_lishin 11y agoI imagine that the probe would set up a transmitter on the surface, and drag a cable behind it through the ice-hole, then deploy another relay at the bottom - probe signals underwater relay, relay passes it onto the surface transmitter, transmitter phones home.
- ramidarigaz 11y agoGetting under the surface of the ice might not be too bad, but getting a signal back up would definitely be.
- baq 11y agoeasy, pack 10km of fibre. oh wait...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Caprinicus 11y agoNonsense, just put a chunk of something radioactive at the bottom and let it melt its way through, and then drop it when you get to water
- jabits 11y agoOh great, let's hose up the environment on our first visit...we will end up doing this anyway, but radioactive chuncks on the sea floor?
- TheLoneWolfling 11y agoIt's probably substantially less damage than the rocket required to launch the extra mass that would be required if we used an alternative, heavier, method.
- jboggan 11y agoJust make sure that we drop it near a black smoker and accelerate evolution for the Europans. I doubt there is much background radiation on the bottom to stimulate random mutations.
- gambiting 11y agoWater is so good at blocking radiation, that an RTG dropped into that ocean would be absolutely nothing. It would be dangerous to anything within 5 meters of it, which again - is absolutely nothing.
- pavel_lishin 11y agoMight make more sense to put the RTG in the nosecone; why ship something radioactive and useful all that way just to throw it away?
- dredmorbius 11y agoThis web site optimized for ... arguing with users. Nondismissable "upgrade your browser" dialog. Which, of course, I can't actually do. I thought we learned this was a bad thing in the 1990s. http://www.htmlhelp.com/feature/art2.htm http://www.htmlhelp.com/feature/art2.htm
- ecolak 11y agoNo lander?? :-(
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- swasheck 11y agoobligatory: ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS — EXCEPT EUROPA ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE
- mrybczyn 11y agosounds like a dare...
- swasheck 11y agohm. seems like we're not fans of 2001 here.
- mrybczyn 11y agothat was the plot of 2061...
- VikingCoder 11y agoThe quote comes from 2010... Which was 5 years ago. PSHEW! (As my mind explodes.)
- swasheck 11y agoBAH! you're right. i'm more ashamed that i misattributed it than the fact that i went boilerplate on HN.
- ProAm 11y agoAnd look how that turned out.
- sneak 11y agoFirst thing that came to my mind, too. Came here to post this. :) Don't sweat the votes. HN mashes the down button for anything confusing or foreign to it.
- moultano 11y ago
- GrantS 11y agoThe most interesting bit to me was learning why the mission involves orbiting Jupiter rather than orbiting Europa directly. Though the text doesn't make it clear, the video explains (starting at 0:59) that directly orbiting Europa would mean too much time spent in the most intense parts of Jupiter's radiation belts. Making 45 Europa fly-bys apparently avoids radiation-related issues and allows for making observations over an extended period of time to detect changes. EDIT: The Wikipedia article on Jupiter's Magnetosphere [1] has great details on the impact of Jupiter's radiation on previous missions. For example, Pioneer 11 lost most of its images of Io, and Galileo had total data loss on three of its orbits. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere_of_Jupiter#Exploration_after_1970 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere_of_Jupiter#Explo...
- devindotcom 11y agoYep. I loved the sprinkler analogy. It's a nice solution (lots of sightseeing opportunities on an orbit that wide) and one that could only be made by very patient people.
- nickmccann 11y agoDoes anyone know how this radiation affects the chance of life on the moon?
- maaku 11y agoUnder kilometers of ice? A non-issue.
- steven777400 11y agoNot an expert, but in this specific case I suspect the radiation has no impact, because any life on Europa is most likely to exist tens of miles beneath the ice surface in the hypothesized warm oceans beneath.
- slg 11y agoThe way I heard it described is that the ice is basically an atmosphere except it is solid instead of gaseous. It apparently provides similar benefits to our atmosphere like stabilizing temperature and shielding from radiation.
- dredmorbius 11y agoJune 17, 2015 15-130 All Systems Go for NASA's Mission to Jupiter Moon Europa Could a liquid water ocean beneath the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa have the ingredients to support life? Here's how NASA's mission to Europa would find out. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech Beyond Earth, Jupiter’s moon Europa is considered one of the most promising places in the solar system to search for signs of present-day life, and a new NASA mission to explore this potential is moving forward from concept review to development. NASA’s mission concept -- to conduct a detailed survey of Europa and investigate its habitability -- has successfully completed its first major review by the agency and now is entering the development phase known as formulation. “Today we’re taking an exciting step from concept to mission, in our quest to find signs of life beyond Earth,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Observations of Europa have provided us with tantalizing clues over the last two decades, and the time has come to seek answers to one of humanity’s most profound questions.” NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter in the late 1990s produced strong evidence that Europa, about the size of Earth’s moon, has an ocean beneath its frozen crust. If proven to exist, this global ocean could hold more than twice as much water as Earth. With abundant salt water, a rocky sea floor, and the energy and chemistry provided by tidal heating, Europa may have the ingredients needed to support simple organisms. The mission plan calls for a spacecraft to be launched to Jupiter in the 2020s, arriving in the distant planet’s orbit after a journey of several years. The spacecraft would orbit the giant planet about every two weeks, providing many opportunities for close flybys of Europa. The mission plan includes 45 flybys, during which the spacecraft would image the moon's icy surface at high resolution and investigate its composition and the structure of its interior and icy shell. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, has been assigned the responsibility of managing the project. JPL has been studying the multiple-flyby mission concept, in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, since 2011. Instruments selected for the Europa mission's scientific payload were announced by NASA on May 26. Institutions supplying instruments include APL; JPL; Arizona State University, Tempe; the University of Texas at Austin; Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio and the University of Colorado, Boulder. “It’s a great day for science,” said Joan Salute, Europa program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We are thrilled to pass the first major milestone in the lifecycle of a mission that will ultimately inform us on the habitability of Europa.” NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington conducts a wide variety of research and scientific exploration programs for Earth studies, space weather, the solar system and the universe. For more information about NASA's mission to Europa, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/europa http://www.nasa.gov/europa -end- Dwayne Brown / Laurie Cantillo Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1726 / 202-358-1077 dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov / laura.l.cantillo@nasa.gov Elizabeth Landau / Preston Dyches Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-354-6425/818-354-7013 elizabeth.r.landau@jpl.nasa.gov / preston.dyches@jpl.nasa.gov Last Updated: June 18, 2015 Editor: Sarah Ramsey (For those on older / non-JS browsers)
- skeuomorf 11y agohmm, let's hope it turns out better this time http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2051879/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2051879/
- jafaku 11y agoIf you want to get hyped, I recommend the movie Europa Report.
- JonnieCache 11y agoSeconded. A great little film.
- anon3_ 11y agoWhat programming languages / operating systems do these systems use? Is there any chance they could be open sourced? Why is the hardware on them so weak? Why is the bandwidth so low? Why can't we just spend a billion dollars for more bandwidth, CPU power and hard drive space? Why don't we just build an army of orbiters and send them into space?
- dm2 11y agohttps://github.com/nasa https://github.com/nasa and http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/opensource/ http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/opensource/ and https://code.nasa.gov/ https://code.nasa.gov/ Hardware has to be radiation hardened and redundant. Bandwidth is so low because it has to send radio waves 500 million miles, and that's not an exaggerated number. https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html Edit: The Deep Space Network is currently down, might be aliens, good luck everybody.
- anon3_ 11y agoWe have billions of dollars. USA already is experts at making complex, reliable and complicated hardware with complex manufacturing processes. Why can't we just craft that hardware we need in bulk? We have billions of dollars in funding. Make a factory production out of it. Why don't we send 300 mars rovers? We can make 5000 tanks. We can build 5000 fighter jets. Why do we just build one rover? My impression with astronomy is it has nowhere near the fervor or seriousness that defense has. Why are we not dumping supply ships in the moon in anticipation of colonization?