The First Europa Lander, What can be done first, cheapest & best? |
The First Europa Lander, What can be done first, cheapest & best? |
Dec 31 2005, 12:08 AM
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Merciless Robot Group: Admin Posts: 8789 Joined: 8-December 05 From: Los Angeles Member No.: 602 |
I think that many people in this forum would agree that somebody's going to have to land on Europa someday before the rather elaborate schemes to penetrate the outer ice layer will ever fly, if for no other reason than to get some relevant ground truth before committing to such an elaborate, expensive, and risky mission.
EO seems to have ruled out any surface science package for that mission (though it would be nice to change their minds! ), but I think that there is a valid requirement at some point to directly assess the surface properties of Europa in an inexpensive yet creative way. Some candidate instrument payloads might be: 1. A sonar transducer/receiver set embedded within a penetrometer to determine crust density and examine the uniformity of the ice layer within the operational radius of the instrument (looking for cracks and holes, in other words). 2. A conductivity sensor again embedded inside a penetrometer to measure the native salinity of the surrounding material and possibly derive some constraints on the composition of metallic salts in the European crust (saltiness has a major effect on ice properties, in addition to the obvious need to derive the salt content of any underlying ocean). 3. A seismometer for all sorts of reasons. How does this sound? Any critiques, additions, or subtractions? I omitted a surface imager not only because of bandwidth/extra complexity considerations but also because it seems desirable to penetrate the crust in order to minimize as much as possible reading any contaminants from Io during surface measurements. The orbiter data could be used to sense and subtract this from the penetrometer readings. -------------------- A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.
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Jun 30 2006, 01:13 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 656 Joined: 20-April 05 From: League City, Texas Member No.: 285 |
My rationale behind sending a rover initially is that, unlike with Mars, missions to the outer solar system are rare and expensive, and you may as well invest a little extra in versatility. Choosing to use an existing rover design which just happens to be good enough to be appropriate to the destination means minimal required investment in R&D (a big part of the price of MSL and other missions), so all you need to do is build a copy from the existing plans and launch it. Heck, build an assembly line and just get in the habit of sending a stanardardized rover out every year or two with incremental inprovements; we could in short order have rovers on every body of interest in the solar system (Ceres, Vesta, the other Galilean satellites, Titan, Triton, Mercury, and some of the other icy satellites). Note that I'm recommending the MSL design, not MER, so no airbags and bouncing would be involved. Sure it might get there and immediately get stuck in a crevice... but it might not, it might be able to rove for hundreds of kilometers and see amazing things. As to the radiation on Europa... I don't know enough about it to determine whether it's a show stopper. And yes, realistically I know that with the current diversion of resources to the manned program [a rant I won't go into here...], this isn't going to happen any time soon. Just wishful thinking. More generally, I think that we need to start developing some standard plug-in compatible components for orbiters and rovers so that putting a mission together is more like building a PC... pick the parts you want, put 'em together, and send them somewhere, with no need for a big engineering project that reinvents the wheel for every mission. Okay, rant over...
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