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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Guest_Myran_* |
Sep 10 2006, 07:42 AM
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Guests |
Thats a wild idea algorimancer.
But regardless how I scrutinize it from front and the rear I cant get it to work. If we think of the gas released by one such impact, it would be in such one limited area that the breaking you get from that are extremely limited. When aerobreaking you need to break around a halfcircle of a world at least and sometimes dipping into the atmosphere many times. Then about the dust plume. Without an atmosphere you cant count on the fact that bigger boulders fall back faster so you can get your lander down on finer dust since it wont be supported by any air molecules. They will in fact fall with almost exactly the same speed. Since the 'atmosphere' or Europa are thinner than the diluted remants of one homeophatic ghost. |
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Sep 10 2006, 01:05 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 656 Joined: 20-April 05 From: League City, Texas Member No.: 285 |
Thats a wild idea algorimancer. But regardless how I scrutinize it from front and the rear I cant get it to work. If we think of the gas released by one such impact, it would be in such one limited area that the breaking you get from that are extremely limited. When aerobreaking you need to break around a halfcircle of a world at least and sometimes dipping into the atmosphere many times. Then about the dust plume. Without an atmosphere you cant count on the fact that bigger boulders fall back faster so you can get your lander down on finer dust since it wont be supported by any air molecules. They will in fact fall with almost exactly the same speed. Since the 'atmosphere' or Europa are thinner than the diluted remants of one homeophatic ghost. Yeah, it is pretty wild. Timing would be critical, and it would demand a lot of the hardware. On the other hand, it could be the difference between a 500 million dollar mission and a 2 billion dollar mission. The intent here is not a traditional aerobraking approach, but somewhere between a hard impact and traditional aerobraking. The idea is to aerobrake into the expanding plume from above, orthogonal to the surface, rather than from the side as in a traditional aerobraking maneuver (though that may work as well or even better). The deceleration would be heavy (orbital speed to near zero in no more than tens of kilometers, if not less than a kilometer), but still something which robust hardware can be designed to accomodate. A tough ablative heat shield would be helpful. Consider that natural impacts can toss intact rocks from Mars or the Moon to Earth. Most of the deceleration would occur within a fraction of a second, but it's a dramatically more survivable proposition than simply impacting the surface. You wouldn't want to ride along though I think the biggest challenge here would be to generate a sufficiently large plume. |
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