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.

[JRehling]

Incidentally, in the case we would ever want to seismically thump Europa to give a lander already on the surface something to detect, the obvious way to do this would be to have the lander and impactor arrive on similar trajectories, with the lander well in advance.

A macro-strategy I have mentioned would be to have a lander in place when an impactor thumps a nearby location, creating a seismic event of known size. At the same time, an Icepick free-return sample return craft in solar orbit flies over, collecting (atomized) samples that are blasted up. The set of three craft would give us a lander, some local seismic data in decent detail, imagery from the impactor as it closed in, sample returns (heavily shocked) and any data the flyby craft could gather. Certainly, an expensive trio of craft, but an intensive set of investigations had all at once.

It occurred to me that an alternative (see above: "obvious way") would be to have the impactor follow a radically different trajectory than the flyby craft and have it go *the other way* around Jupiter (clockwise, as seen from north) while the flyby craft would go clockwise. This would add to the kinetic energy of the impact event considerably (perhaps 13 km/s), which would mean that less mass could achieve the same sized impact. However, if the goal were to have an Icepick flyby, this design would present considerable engineering constraints on the surface location. If the only goal were to have a seismic lander and an impactor, then the restrictions would be less.

If it were possible to fly a free-return flyby craft also going clockwise around Jupiter, then the constraints are lifted greatly.

That is a feasible mission for hitting Europa and studying its surface. The value of the impact, incidentally, is in delivering a known thump to the areas very near the lander. Presumably, knowing the crustal thickness/structure at a chosen location is a worthy goal -- having a general knowledge of the thickness of the crust, with less detail, is probably far less desirable. As Bob Pappalardo et al have shown, the thickness has to be fairly uniform, by and large.

[ljk4-1]

Nuke Europa? You aren't thinking grand enough.

Drop Europa on Mars, then send a mission to analyze the debris while making a new world for humanity to live on without space suits and pressure domes.

http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/larryn...ars_000710.html

How to move Europa? A series of impacts to knock it into a gravitational swingby of Jupiter to accelerate it to Mars faster. If Europa breaks up from the impact, just attach rockets onto the pieces and direct them to Mars.

Why not just grab some already smaller NEO comets, you say? Ah, what fun is that?

Of course if we decide instead to use Europa for material to make the Dyson Shell, we can study the interior then, which will no doubt be in better shape than just smashing it into Mars.

http://www.alcyone.com/max/writing/essays/...son-shells.html

http://www.merzo.net/500000kmpp.htm

[Bob Shaw]

We *mustn't* nuke Europa.

The big oblong guys wouldn't like it, oh no.

All the rest of the worlds are ours, though...

Bob Shaw