Nuking Europa, Nukes and other 'futuristic' ideas for exploring Europa Options

[SergeyVLazarev]

Hi all! In my opinion, Europa explorer must be cheap and simple.

It must consist of 5 parts - 2 orbiters, 3 small and robust landers, and 3 nuclear and termonuclear bombs. I think that 10 Kt - 100 kt - 1 Mgt sequence is optimal.


First orbiter is robust, high protected from radioactivity, armed device. On high orbite over Europe
With simple and primitive long focused camera, laser-radar. It must to spectacle and record all nuclear explosion parametres.
has also a radio recever from landers.

second orbiter is orbiting low over the Europe. It must to fly over epicenter of nuke and drop lander to measure and see all.
To defend more complex second orbiter from radioactivity rays of nuclear explosion, we struck and explode a nuke in another side of Europe

Why nukes? Because it reveal all. First one, we"ll have a great quake of Europe. And can record all seismic infomation without landers.
next one. we can to melt ice and see a clear water - just hollow in the crust!!!

at 3 rd.

We dont need a special lander. If we can melt great hollow in crust - we'll have a liquid water to catch our lander! We dont need airbags, rockets. Just an robust "lander" like small susmarine!!

4 th. we ll have great cloud of water vapour and ice to take from there any chemical information.

[SergeyVLazarev]

Not really. Ice can crack but it's actually a remarkably resilient mineral when you have to deal with it on the scale of mountains. The surface of Europa probably has a structure not dissimilar to Icebergs. The US Navy discovered this when they tested the idea of blowing up Icebergs to test if it was possible to destroy bergs threatening shipping lanes. They came to the conclusion fairly quickly that they'd need much bigger guns and gave up. This pdf about Icebergs closes with this comment:

On Earth we have a stone earthcrust.
It's very resilent material.
But, despite all, we have so many weak places - voulcanos, drifts, cracks, caves and hot magma can erupt to surface.
If Europa ice crust similar to the Earth crust - and it must be similar, we can find weak places in Europa, and we can weak them more. :-)
If here, on the Earth, instead magma we have water and low gravity, like on Europa, we'll be can to explore earth inner layers. ;-)

Also to return to Doug's point. A surface\air blast will excavate very little. You need to bury your bombs. The first one you could possibly just send in any old how and hope for the best but the subsequent ones would have to come in vertically, that would be require lots of fuel and some very fancy flying.
This document states that approximately 16% of a surface blast goes into cratering\ground shock etc. It also lists some numbers for the destruction depth effects - the maximum depth of destruction for a 9Megaton surface detonation is ~180m.

Its not a problem. Just dont brake bombs when it will fly to Europe.
50 km\sec of bomb velocity means that in time of ignition and some time after expolosion epicentre of bomb explosion fly past 0.5-1 km.

If we ignite bomb just over surface we get very hot, and very fast moving penetrating plasma ball with high ability to pierce any material in our world.

next point. In last termonukes hydrogene of water began burning, that gave addition yield, and yield of 100-mt class soviet bomb was reduced to half value, to prevent losing of control and BADA-BOOM of ocean water.
So, it very easy to gain to highest yields - we can just burn hydrogene of Europe ice, to achive ten or thousand Gt yields. gigatonns.