June 12 2007 Icy Moons (rev 46) Options

[dvandorn]

I dunno -- it seems to me that to move across the surface of a small body which has such little mass that it's truly what I would call a microgravity environment, you can't rely on the possibility that you will encounter a natural handhold when you need to slow down, stop, or change directions. Grab hold of a rock sitting on the surface, and you're not going to stop yourself, you're going to pull the rock off of the body and bring it with you.

I think you'd have to somehow implant anchoring stakes on such a surface and string lines between the stakes. The stakes would have to be driven deeply enough to be able to stay anchored as the mass of your body, plus your environment suit, pulls at them with the force of your momentum. So it looks like small bodies may have to be "prepared" for human exploration before anyone can actually touch them and maneuver around on them.

This wouldn't just apply to small icy bodies like Atlas, but to most small bodies like asteroids and comets. You'd have to pre-emplace anchors and lines in order to safely move around the surfaces of such bodies. Otherwise, you'd either fly right off (though I imagine you'd be tethered to your ship) or you wouldn't be able to easily maneuver to the location on the surface you want to visit.

Your other option, of course, would be to use something like the AMU, a self-contained, RCS-controlled backpack that would move you along the surface and automatically adjust for the tiny pull of the body you're studying. It would be more like flying along, facing an icy or rocky wall, than "walking" on the body.

-the other Doug

[Exploitcorporati...]

You reach out in front of you to a small encrusted projection, barely a minor ridge within your formerly terrestrial frame of reference but a mountain here...and you pull on it as if you were diving along a coral reef...and you move with surprising velocity over the snowy surface, at an altitude of centimeters, looking for the next ridge to shove you ever onward...

Blissful. A deep dream come alive. Float almost effortlessly across a surface, and scoop a handful of the rings of Saturn as you pass by, glance up and see Saturn huge in front of you, the major moons as bright stars or perhaps barely resolvable tiny crescents if you're particularly lucky...who could want anything more?

Toyota (smack)

That's nifty, nprev. I want a picture of this.

[belleraphon1]

Gotta add: "skimming". Let's say, and why not, that you're in a spacesuit on the surface of this moon with which you have barely any gravitational connection. You reach out in front of you to a small encrusted projection, barely a minor ridge within your formerly terrestrial frame of reference but a mountain here...and you pull on it as if you were diving along a coral reef...and you move with surprising velocity over the snowy surface, at an altitude of centimeters, looking for the next ridge to shove you ever onward...

Blissful. A deep dream come alive. Float almost effortlessly across a surface, and scoop a handful of the rings of Saturn as you pass by, glance up and see Saturn huge in front of you, the major moons as bright stars or perhaps barely resolvable tiny crescents if you're particularly lucky...who could want anything more?

Very nice nprev.... you expressed exactly what I felt and saw in my minds eye.

Thanks Stu for the term "golluming"...

And dvandorn is correct that moving along the surface of small bodies will be quite a challenge. Which is EXACTLY why it will someday be done and built its own ethic, technique, and terms.... fun to think about.

But for now I will just delight in nprev's words and my mental play...

Craig

[jasedm]

I reckon that Pan and Daphnis may look pretty similar in close-up, with Pan (based on far-out images so far) being an even more extreme case than Atlas with the whole snow-girdle thing.
I'm going to show my ignorance here, but presumably Atlas is not tidally-locked to Saturn, leading to roughly equal accretion of ring particles around the equator, rather than them piling-up preferentially on the leading hemisphere. If not tidally locked, then it lends wait to the theory of the rings (and embedded moons) being the result of the disruption of a body that wandered too close to Saturn, and that the rings themselves are a (cosmologically) fleeting phenomenon that we're very privileged to see.

[volcanopele]

Actually, Pan is lemon-shaped.

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Actually, Pan is lemon-shaped.

I thought it was lime-shaped.

[Stu]

Just wondering... does anybody else live in a constant sense of amazement at the things we see now? I mean, every time we think we've seen the strangest of the strangest, the weirdest of the weird, the universe taps us on the shoulder and whispers "Pssst... look over there..." and we turn around and there's some gorram unbelievably freakish impossible new weirdest of the weird thing staring at us from the Black...

When I was young and saw my first pictures of Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris I thought they were the most amazing things I'd ever seen, or would see. In the years that followed I saw phlegmy volcanoes of bubbling sulphur on Io... the cracked frozen-coffee surface of Europa... Earth as a "pale blue dot" from the edge of the solar system... a "Death Star" orbiting Saturn... the "Pillars of Creation" through Hubble's eyes... the surface of Titan, the crumbling cliffs and steep slopes of a half mile wide crater blasted out of Mars, Earth as a "star" through a gap in Saturn's rings, the sun setting behind mountains on Barsoom, Europa rising up like a phantom from behind the limb of Jupiter, streamers and ribbons of blue flame inside then plume of a volcano vomiting out of Io...

... and now this, this tiny Saturnian moon of crackling ice and accumulated scrunching snow that looks like every UFO I ever drew on the covers of my school exercise books as a kid...

Seriously, I mean it, does anyone else ever just sit back from their screens, looking at these images, and think...

Unbelievable... just unbelievable...

[climber]

Yes Stu, we must admit that Nature has much more immagination than us, poor humans. I've been told of this a long time ago but I'm sure the one that told it too me would be washed away again and again as I am. This is the beauty of unmanned spaceflight : get close to "objects" no reachable in the immediate future directly by humans... this is why I log so often here on UMSF (1001 and counting...)
Thanks again Stu for sharing your feelings so emotionaly

[belleraphon1]

Stu...

I have been seeing the marvelous and bizzarre since the 60's.... that first look at Earth from the Lunar Orbiters.... aahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh have to run but...

yes, even though I am older than the space age, I am still constantly amazed and grateful for living in this time.

And I am constantly blown away by what I see and what is hinted at to come and who knows what wonder tomorrow will bring.....

and glad to be an UMSFer.

Craig

[dvandorn]

Yes, Stu. I do.

Reminds me of a song lyric from the musical "1776":

"Is anybody there?
Does anybody care?
Does anybody see
What I see?"

-the other Doug

[Gsnorgathon]

... I'm going to show my ignorance here, but presumably Atlas is not tidally-locked to Saturn, leading to roughly equal accretion of ring particles around the equator, rather than them piling-up preferentially on the leading hemisphere. If not tidally locked, then it lends wait to the theory of the rings (and embedded moons) being the result of the disruption of a body that wandered too close to Saturn, and that the rings themselves are a (cosmologically) fleeting phenomenon that we're very privileged to see.

Not sure if Atlas is tide-locked or not, but I could see an initially tide-locked Atlas piling so much stuff up on its leading face that it would then have to rotate to maintain equilibrium; and then gradually becoming tide-locked again. Atlas may alternate between tide-locked and asynchronous rotation. The odd cross-section of Atlas's equator may be hinting at this.

[Gsnorgathon]

I thought it was lime-shaped.

I thought it was banana-shaped.

[lyford]

OK... this is getting too weird - Alton Brown, Cohen Bros. films, 1776, Monty Python.... all faves of mine. I hate to say it but there appears to be an elite eclectic cultural demographic shaping up here at UMSF. All I need to find is a Swann and Flanders fan here...

[Stu]

ON ATLAS’ SHOULDERS…

To their visor-shielded eyes as they approach me -
their gaze constantly drawn away by Saturn’s
swirled-syrup clouds and icy, jewelled rings – I’ll seem
a thing bizarre; a saucer-shaped albino freak
drifting meekly through the dark, peeking
at the planet’s pastel-painted face from the safety
of ring-shadows wide enough to swallow worlds…

But when Sol rises from behind - then blazes above –
my peaks they will see me as I really am: proud and noble
Atlas, a Titan’s tortured son, born of ice and dust,
a hoarfrost-crusted starstone left weary beyond words
from carrying the sky upon hunched shoulders
of ancient rock and boulders, draped by layers of ring-snow
folded over and over and over…

Finally, after a nervous landing they will stand on me,
turn their visors to the sky - but see only black:
Saturn’s sulking, bulging bulk an ink stain
on the star-sewn cloth of night, an Ultreyan
abyss in the sky spotted here and there by flashbulb
lightning sparks against the darkness; fluttering
auroral flames playing round its poles while his rings,
a razor-thin blade of flaming, brittle light, slice him clean in two –

- until finally bright Sol appears, spears of light
stabbing out from behind Saturn’s great curved limb for
a heartbeat before the star itself explodes into view.
A nuclear fireball of purest white, God’s floodlight
shining on my landscape! No escape now from
the Truth: they stand upon a tiny world, an ice grain
whirling round a whale, pale and frail against its side…

Look, they’ll cry – snow! and staring at the sky
will see a billion firefly specks drifting through the high
vault of the heavens; playful faeries flitting in the light
of Saturn’s sudden dawn, each flickering flake
a refugee fleeing from the planet’s rings;
too-small-to-fall-in-anything-but-silence things
that on their own are nothing, but over aeons
have gathered round me like a skirt of dirty lace.

And golluming over me, belly-sliding over the crumping snow
they'll know, and feel it in their brittle bones that gravity is but
a memory here, out where the air is thick with flakes
of Saturn's Death Star'd moon...

[ngunn]

need to find is a Swann and Flanders fan here...