[X] My Assistant

[nprev]

Just got to thinking about some of the problems that may have to be addressed if & when we ever try to visit Titan in person.

The first thing that comes to mind is what might happen if some Titanian air gets inside an oxygen-rich manned spacecraft, say from minor airlock residue. I imagine that the explosive potential of some of the trace gasses is pretty high, and there's probably also a significant risk of poisonous compounds as well. So, here are some tenative requirements:

1. REALLY efficient air-scavenging airlocks.
2. Surface suits that can't trap external gasses in creases, folds, etc.
3. Spark-proof electrical/electronic everything.
4. Smoking is strictly forbidden (with apologies to the entire 1950s SF movie genre!)

Gotta be more...any ideas?

[dvandorn]

Oh, I understand -- uranium has a higher potential energy density than a lithium battery. I'm just thinking in terms of logistics. Any plan that requires bringing along enough fissile materials to support a manned base is going to be harder to accomplish (in terms of just getting everything to Titan and setting it up) than a plan that can actually draw enough power for its operations from indigenous sources.

Titan is just so energy-poor... you'd need to cover hundreds of square kilometers of landscape with solar cells to get anything useful at that distance from the Sun and through that thick haze. And you just can't extract heat out of a system that doesn't have any...

-the other Doug

[djellison]

Any plan that requires bringing along enough fissile materials to support a manned base is going to be harder to accomplish (in terms of just getting everything to Titan and setting it up) than a plan that can actually draw enough power for its operations from indigenous sources.

Not really, no. It's entirely dependent on the mass of a small reactor compared to the mass of whatever equipment and resources you bring along to use 'indigenous' sources (such as taking O2 to burn local material) I would also have thought the former would be simpler and more reliable. That one would be heavier than another is not certain.
Doug