ITT: We design a space project to Europa

For me Europea, a moon of Jupiter was always an interessting target for a space mission, because in the water below the Ice there could be life.

Let's design an imaginary space program to the moon together.

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jpl.nasa.gov/missions/europa-mission/
youtube.com/watch?v=lAupJzH31tc
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Manned or unmanned?

Manned of course! It would be impolite to send a robot to represent Earth, when meeting a new form of life.

I like how you think. Don't send a robot to do a man's job.

Heated drilling? Chemical might work. Both require a lot of resources and mechanical-only requires a lot of power. Unless guys get out and use picks.
Might be to unstable to have a shaft open.

we don't have the technology to keep the crew alive for the trip. I propose we have them arrive dead as zombies.

Two-part mission with an orbiter and a lander.

Both spacecraft need to be designed to be radiation hardened, we'll nominally aim for a 2 year total mission duration from arrival at Jupiter to spacecraft disposal.

The orbiter slows into a polar Europa orbit with a semimajor axis of 500km and an eccentricity of as close to zero as we can get it. It then uses a combination of lidar and radar to map the entire surface of Europa to a detail of a few meters per pixel and get basic composition data. This should only take a couple weeks at most. Meanwhile the spacecraft will also be analyzing any dust particles it encounters and watching for any water vapor plumes that may be erupting from the surface.

Once the initial mapping phase is complete and a suitable landing location is identified the lander will separate from the orbiter and begin its descent, first by dropping into an eccentric orbit taking it close to the surface over its landing site, waiting for the landing site to be in the correct position, then at periapsis performing a single-burn landing maneuver. After the lander has separated from the orbiter the orbiter will finalize its orbit and begin to collect very accurate gravitational readings in order to study Europa's deep interior, as well as continuing to operate its previously functioning science equipment and activating any other equipment at this time.

Once touched down the lander would deploy a robotic arm to collect surface samples, a sonar device to scan underneath the surface of the icy crust and possibly determine the depth of the ice layer as well as the purity (how many rocky inclusions may exist in Europa's upper ice layer is unknown), and various thermometers/spectral analyzers/seismic monitors/cameras and so forth.

Both the lander and the orbiter would be powered by RTGs, with the orbiter having a much bigger power supply as it would handle the Earth communications as well as using lidar and radar instruments.

>The radiation level at the surface of Europa is equivalent to a dose of about 5400 mSv (540 rem) per day,[40] an amount of radiation that would cause severe illness or death in human beings exposed for a single day.[41]

>send men to break ice on Europe to reach the hidden sea

I have lots of ice breaking experience. Perhaps a submersible can have manual attachments that the guy inside can hit with a hammer to break ice outside or perhaps some rotary thing?

I guess it'd come down to oxygen and food as the fuel. I wonder which is most efficient. Certainly not food since we can't make it on the moon unless we garden it.

What manner of shielding is needed, because Europe has some really fucking bad radiation.

How do we make power to power the drill? Hell, how do they stay warm? RTGs seem like a good idea for their waste heat, but you'd need a lot of them for good power output.

Maybe we could send a team down into one of the vents and have them install a tube as they go down to stabilize it? What temperature are those vents?

We do have the technology, just nothing has been engineered to do it. There's nothing new that needs to be discovered to get tech to do this. It is only money and engineering the proper designs.

Zombies require less life support though amd unlike robots they still count as people

Europa's ice layer is 15,000 to 25,000 meters thick

The deepest hole ever bored in ice on earth is 3,600 meters and it required a massive drill to retrieve a relatively small sample

Cant we compromise and send black women? They only cost 73% as much and only count as 5/7th man

Manned mission is too difficult. I propose instead of going to Europa, we bring Europa to us.

Pic related.

Alternate phase 4: send robotic asteroid wranglers to capture the debris and bring it to Earth orbit instead of hoping that it drifts here

One way trip maybe? It'll be more or less suicidal mission anyway, returning them would complicate things more. With one way you can also bring more habitat and equipment.

jpl.nasa.gov/missions/europa-mission/

>manned mission
>to Europa
>deep inside of Jupiter's supercharged van Allen belts on steroids
Are you trying to reenact the fantastic 4 or something?

Seems best to break surface with giant meteor..

Europa's gravity is 0.134G, which would imply that to reach the same pressures as would be experienced on Earth you would need to go 7.46 times deeper.

25 kilometers divided by 7 is 3.35 kilometers. Ice is less dense than water, and we've already built many functioning vehicles that can dive to depths below 7km, so surviving the pressures that would exist under Europa's ice sheet should not be difficult.

Drilling isn't an option because ice can flow quite quickly. We'd need a melt probe.

Couldn't we smash through the ice with an asteroid? I guess the only problem is that kind of impact may possibly cause a mass extinction of life, if there is any there. Plus that would be rather rude of us

>mass extincting ayyliums
>anything but a bonus
We can do science on fossils just fine, user

I wonder if there's additional layers of ice down there. Like you break through the massive one, get into an area of no ice then reach another shell of ice. The composition of the water would need to change of course. It'd be like how sea water freezes and pours high density/salinity water down to the sea floor and as it goes down it instantly freezes everything around it because it is far colder than the normal salinity sea water.

>webm related
youtube.com/watch?v=lAupJzH31tc
youtube.com/watch?v=WyWn1XJ9kTE

If the water has various strata of brine or other dissolved minerals we could see things like a sea under the sea, multiple strata of ice at different depths and all manner of odd formation. As such, a single submersible "drill" may need a way to sink properly where normally it wouldn't sink into the denser "water". It may be too buoyant.

Using an asteroid requires wrangling an asteroid and changing its Delta-V.

The tech, time, energy, and money spent doing that one thing may be far more than a single drilling mission on Europe itself.

This. You'd need to have something in place to do the research anyway. The amount of reaction mass and engines you'd blow on deorbiting something that can crack open that shell would be better spent just sending oil rig and few tough guys there.

We could always just strip mine away the top layers so we only have to drill a little bit

One of the first things we do is stop spending money on bullshit

...

why not just go during summer when there's no ice

Is the bullshit the part where you keep the general population alive, or the part where we pay back the money they loaned us?

why do people meme about europa so much, when ganymede and callisto have liquid water too

The great dilemma that is now facing us and will keep facing us, is do we use our technological triumph to sustain a population of bottom feeders multiplying without bounds, or reach out into space to make our species permanent? Welfare for niggers is a complete fucking waste of money.

Ganymede and Callisto are bigger and their insides are under enough pressure that the water at the bottom of their oceans is almost certainly compressed into a form of ice (different from regular ice) that prevents liquid water coming into contact with rock, and thus precludes complex chemistry.

The real meme is that Enceladus is so often ignored when it has fully and constantly active salty water jets.

spending only a small amount of money on space exploration - better chance of surviving on Earth, while slowly but surely developing technologies and making discoveries
going all out on space exploration - lower chance of surviving on Earth and a chance of people rebelling against it, no guarantee of actually achieving anything as far as space colonization

spending a tiny fraction of tax money on space exploration related research is BY FAR the smartest approach in the long run

welfare for elderly is more than welfare for browns right now
Though that'll change as the brown population skyrockets

Geologists can't make accurate predictions of what the earth is like 5 km below their feet

I would take any predictions about internal compositions of asteroids/moons with a large helping of salt

Not really. The population won't rebel if you give them bread and circuses in exchange for sterilization.

Geologists can't make accurate predictions of what the earth is like 5 km below their feet

sources

this guy fucks

The source being every single deep drill where their predictions always go wrong

did... did some of those starros die when that icicle landed near them?

Yes, everything it touched or encased as it was moving died. After it freezes things can crawl over it.

...

Special considerations need to be taken for the fact that we wont be drilling all the way through the suface before we get smacked with high-pressure geysers of brine or water or whatever.

Everyone knows that jews are like cockroaches they survive everything even holocaust.
So let's take as many jews as we can and send them to europa.

Don't we need like... A really thick radiatiom blocking wall to stop Jupiter's radiation alone? A man would die a few weeks before arriving due of the radiation exposion. Sorry guys, I don't even think a probe will survive long enough to do extensive research.
We can better head straight to our graves instead.

How are you going to keep tabs on this rover when Europa is occluded by Jupiter. Cant tell the probe to just keep drilling for 4 days straight. How about a drill system that has to penetrate through miles of ice to gain access to the top of the mantle ocean? Gonna take a lot longer than the 2 year lifetime you set for these probes. Also, planet wide lidar coverage at

Honestly this

...

Totally forgot about that, good call. Maybe like in we'd be better off going down an existing vent. Then there wouldn't be an extreme different in pressure or flow as there would be drilling a new hole.

Relay satellites.

Veeky Forums is blind when it comes to space exploration
there are massive problems in front of it, but Veeky Forums will just assume these obstacles will eventually be solved somehow, so we can ignore them and go ahead and discuss a bunch of plans about how to dig and terraform a whole planet.

If I'm not wrong, back in 70s or 80s NASA launch a probe that went to Jupiter and was supposed to launch in Europa, but after that shit was close enough in 2000s, they reallized that it wasn't sterilized and had to throw it away in Jupiter atmosphere. So I guess it would still take 20~30 years to went to it, so I'm not really sure which humans would wait for so long inside a tin can around almost nothing besides radiation, lights from far away and 1 oxygen atom per cubic meter. That's the first problem to do the space trip 2.0.
If there was a way like in Interstellar to put them to sleep for years, would be awesome.

>As Europa receives 5.4 Sv (540 rem) of radiation per day,[2] a human would not survive at or near the surface of Europa for long without significant radiation shielding. Colonists on Europa would have to descend beneath the surface when Europa is not protected by Jupiter's magnetotail, and stay in subsurface habitats. This would allow colonists to use Europa's ice sheet to shield themselves from radiation.

Radiation is easy to block with enough rsources.

>colonists
>far under 1g

J•E•L•L•O B•A•B•I•E•S
J•E•L•L•O B•A•B•I•E•S
J•E•L•L•O B•A•B•I•E•S
J•E•L•L•O B•A•B•I•E•S

'Right, partner.
A shame Veeky Forums doesn't focus at resolving such problems, it'd be a good excercise.

>If I'm not wrong, back in 70s or 80s NASA launch a probe that went to Jupiter and was supposed to launch in Europa, but after that shit was close enough in 2000s, they reallized that it wasn't sterilized and had to throw it away in Jupiter atmosphere.

But if you ARE wrong, then that never happened.

The lander has no subsurface probe. That would require a separate mission, and would use a nuclear heat source to melt through the ice rather than drilling because drilling would be infeasible.

Europa orbits Jupiter once every 85 hours. It would be occluded by Jupiter for a few hours every few Earth days.

The entire surface of Europa gets mapped in a lower resolution first, then interesting areas get mapped in higher resolution as directed by scientists on Earth.

Jello babies are a meme until we do experiments to prove reduced gravity has similar effects as zero G.

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA.
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.
USE THEM TOGETHER. USE THEM IN PEACE.

>use all these worlds together and for peace
>except Europa

How soon can we start a Casaba-Howitzer bombardment of Europa

I just don't remember the year that happened and if it really was Europa or another Jupiter moon, lol

no, NASA never disposed of a probe about to perform a mission because 'oh fuck lol we forgot to sterilize it'.

NASA however does have a policy of safely disposing of probes that have completed their missions and are going to be decommissioned. The Galileo probe, after is mission was compete, was slowed in its orbit and allowed to fall to Jupiter just on the off chance that in a million years it may collide with one of the icy moons of Jupiter and contaminate it with any life that may have hitched a ride.

The Monolith-People would "check" you somehow, for interfering with their eon-long plan for future development of distinctive life.

They wouldn't eliminate you (they caused you as well, after all), but they would damn sure make sure that you don't go fucking up their new testbed.

And they placed it close to you, on purpose. both to let you know that they exist, and of their power, relative to yours.

You were told nicely. Stay out of Europa.

Oh, that makes more sense

So are all the scientists also death row inmates?

With the radiation around Jupiter, nobody who goes will leave Europa alive. And nope, sorry sci-fi fanboys even if NASA was given the DOD budget this fact will never change.

Grow the fuck up.