>Europa's crust is 19-27km thick
>Our only chance of finding life in our solar system, and probably the universe for many centuries
>can't even reach it
it hurts
I guess you could get a lander that drops some sort of probe in a nuclear-heated shell that slowly and steadily melts through, but you still have the issue of getting the data back to Earth. A wireless connection to the lander on the surface is out of the question but making a 20+km wired connection is almost equally futile.
Any ideas?
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>20+km wired connection is almost equally futile
That's actually not that much wire, especially if you're NASA who can come up with some sort of very thin yet strong wire. The boring probe would carry a spool with it during its descent, and the ice refreezing above the boring probe would support the wire. It would only have to transmit data since the part melting through the ice would already have onboard power from the RTG. That would let you use something like a single strand of fiber optic cable which is extremely thin and threadlike yet reasonably strong. That would provide plenty of bandwidth for several HD video streams up to the lander on the surface, at the very least.
tl;dr: stop being a know it all
Why not install wireless relays at intervals as it drills down
Drill into the wall of the hole and push an rf transmitter-receiver into it
I suppose there's always pic related.
Europa has geysers though - so it can't be that thick everywhere.
Would need several exploratory expeditions to find sweet spots though, so I kinda doubt we'll find anything within the century, if there's anything to find.
We won't live long enough to find it out anyways.
Hurts so much
le melt through it with a nuclear reactor
problem solveded
>doesn't understand what a radioisotope thermal generator is
Not gonna make it
nukes.
for what purpose would there be to do this?
Why would you spend billions to send a fucking drill to there instead of machinery to produce rocket fuel/habitats
>but you still have the issue of getting the data back to Earth.
what is a cable?
casaba howitzer
Curiosity uses one NASA MMRTG. which produces 110 watts of electricity and produces enough waste heat to keep the rover warm.
A Europa lander/driller/submarine prove would have to use many MMRTGs. at least two for the lander.. then 4 or more for the probe as it melts down and gets to work.
because there might be life on Europa.
Big metal drill with a radioactive block of material used to heat it.
Basically like this on a larger scale
youtube.com
Just apply pressure and wait. Give your submarine a shape which will make sure that it always rests it's whole weight on one point, this should let it melt the ice under it and slowly go throught the ice make it so that you need to wait a year or two. It takes no recources and isn't really hard if you design the submarine right.
The chances of there actually being life on Europa, or Enceladus, or anywhere in this solar system is effectively zero, and I think the scientists who really study this stuff know that. They just talk up the idea because it gets them funding and they get probes sent to those places to better study environments that could potentially harbour life.
Intelligent life anywhere in our solar system is effectively 0
Ftfy
RTGs for satellites put out kilowatt levels of energy.
You answered your own question. 20 km+ wired connections have been used on robots before. The Nereus ROV had a fiberoptic tether 40 km long.
Of course a tether this long is heavy and we don't understand europa's ice all that well. We don't know if it shifts around or if the ocean is really that deep.
>> wireless out of the question
Not entirely. Ice is relatively transparent to radiowaves for the same reason microwaves suck at heating up completely frozen food. Things like ice penetrating radar exist
We wait for our alien overlords to ignite Jupiter and melt the ice
you would have to add dozens of jupiters to jupiter, to have enough mass for the smallest and coldest red dwarf.
>Our only chance of finding life in our solar system
Nope. It's one of several possibilities
>probably the universe for many centuries
Still no.
Even possible improvements in radio receiver technology could lead to discovery of intelligent life.
And "many centuries" is unduly pessimistic for interstellar travel.
>>can't even reach it
"Can't"?
Wow, user, why don't you just open a vein and get it over with?
that might work if the tunnel stayed open but it'll refreeze behind the probe, and rf doesnt transmit worth a shit through ice.
this is probably the best bet.
inverse square law and and the speed of light make finding intelligent life more than a few light years away very improbable.
>drill through 25km of ice
not gonna drill it, Skillet
gonna melt it
We gotta train the best drillers to become astronauts.
ATTEMPT
Unsurprisingly this exact idea has already been thought about and even tested in Alaska
space.com
also
>Named VALKYRIE (Very deep Autonomous Laser-powered Kilowatt-class Yo-yoing Robotic Ice Explorer)
NASA's acronym game is weak
>more than a few light years away
And what if it's closer than that?
>speed of light
I don't get this angle.
If we made a receiver sensitive enough, it could pick up decades (or centuries) old signals.
Speed of light would hamper conversing, but not detection.
put salt on it
build a nuclear powerplant there and let it have a nuclear meltdown
BBC designed drilling machinery.
>it hurts
Only because you are retarded. Save your brain power for asking me if I want super size my combo.
We use a microwave.
No, I am serious here. Specifically the magnetron on a microwave, attack it to a wave guide "akin" to a tin can, with an RTG to power it. It will heat the water to bore through the ice making a secondary probe.
Our secondary probe will transmit data back to the lander on frequencies transparent to ice, which transmits the information to us.
We cant even drill 20 km down on earth what the fuck
there is no place on earth where there is 20 km of ice to drill through
>We won't live long enough to find it out anyways.
>WE'RE KILLIN' MOTHER GAIA, MA-A-A-A-AN
Well, you certainly won't, you filthy pot-sucking hippie degenerate.
I think he may have been referring to human life expectancy
There aren't any transmissions to pick up. If there was itelligent, space faring life anywhere nearby, chances are they'd blot out thousands of suns already with dyson swarms
>implying there are not better ways of collecting energy for a powerhungry advanced civilization that don't involve overcompensating megastructures screaming "I'm here, fuck me up"
>Not just sending a relativistic speed projectile to smash the ice
The memedrive should take care of it.
NO
LANDINGS
>>Our only chance of finding life in our solar system, and probably the universe for many centuries
It's extremely improbable that there's life down there. Why do you even get your hopes up?
It does not have to stay open, since the borer is carrying the spool.
THERE
Europa has cracks in the ice crust.
Probs weaker and thinner ice.
JUST
KIDDING
FREE
EUROPAN
FISH
SANDWHICHES
Pretty easy to do because Europa doesnt have that annoying shit called magma that will burst through your hole the closer you get to the mantle.
FOR
FIRST
FIFTY
Europa has water so it will have life, bacteria can be found in sulfur lakes on our planet user, and the first living things existed when this rock was basically Venus's bigger brother 4.1 billion years ago.
LANDERS
prove it then.
Here's the Veeky Forums gold standard MS paint schematic diagram that everyone asked for.
WHO
Your lander looks to be doing a shit on Enceladus
It'll be the most scientific shit that will ever have been shat.
I don't know if I like the odds though.
>your entire mission is dependent on a single 20km strand of fiber optic
>How are we going to drill through 25km of ice
Just drop a kilo of Uranium on it, it will melt thru.
Pretty sure he meant 'we' in the sense of people who are alive today
Neil tyson has some competition?
those solar panels would have to be huge to even power anything on enchiladas. If you used it on Europe you'd need the 'computer n sheit' to be in a huge radiation proof bunker so that the probe doesn't get fried to hell
This is true, a particular challenge given that no space craft usually has radiation shielding.
Truly exceptional conditions
and how would you know if there were stars already covered by dyson "spheres" seeing that it's impossible to detect them?
Juno has a little bit of radiation shielding.
>The ability of DNA replicators to adapt to various environments means that those replicators will magically spring into existence anywhere there's water
People really believe this, don't they?
Life existed before water on earth user, as the oceans are only 3.8 billion years old and life was here since 4.1 billion years ago.
How exactly does that work? The oldest evidence for life on Earth are fossils from underwater hydrothermal vents.
>life was here since 4.1 billion years ago.
i thought that oceans were 3.8 BYA and earliest signs are life are like 3.75 BYA or something
where does your 4.1 come from?
nukes
i should have just googled before asking but i'm too stupid
i guess oldest life signs are maybe as old as 4.28 but those still formed in underwater hydrothermal vents, it's just that so much of the water on the planet at that time was gas that technically the oceans didn't exist yet but yeah, first life still occurred underwater
Would probably be much better off drilling than melting. The ice on Europa is around -160 C. You would need an incredible amount of power to warm that ice, then melt it, and I seriously doubt we could put a reactor that large onto the surface.
Curiosity has the largest RTG ever sent into space and it would take hundreds of years to melt through the surface at constant power output.
IMO we either need to use a drill or a kinetic impactor.
>what if we are the alien overlords
stop being a beta gamma lets get more alpha scientists
its extremely impossible to keep 20km of ice melted simultaneously so your wire can keep probing deeper. Most likely you'll get 500m before the ice behind you refreezes your wire into place permanently. goodbye billions of dollars of wasted taxpayer money on stupid scientists.
You can have the spool of cable in the probe
>nuclear-powered laser melts probe down to ocean, depositing a string of radio receiver buoys that freeze into place above it
>submarine pops out of probe and does submarine things, navigating with gyroscope and doppler velocity log
>final approach back to the probe base is with a really fucking bright light, it then hooks itself up and sends pictures of delicious space fish to NASA
The SIMPLE Artemis system is the one that seems to be getting traction now. It's made by Stone Aerospace and works nicely in Antarctica. Good luck googling it these guys fly pretty far under the radar.
Wow, you must be way smarter than those stupid scientists!
1.3/10 Worst new post
>doesn't know what a Dyson swarm is
>thinks there is a more efficient way of getting power in space than parking next to a star
>spheres
No spheres, nigger. Swarms.
>how could we see them
All that heat still has to dissipate somehow. Specifically, a dyson swarm would be very faint or invisible in visible light but really bright at room temperature IR wavelengths. If you'd read more than an introductory pop sci clickbait article paragraph on the subject you'd know this
>The ice on Europa is around -160 C. You would need an incredible amount of power to warm that ice, then melt it, and I seriously doubt we could put a reactor that large onto the surface.
Ice specific heat capacity - 2.1kJ/kg
Water enthalpy of fusion - 335kJ/kg
Ice temperature (according to you) - -160°C, which is equal to required delta T in K anyways
So you need 337kJ to warm the ice to 0°C plus an additional 335 to melt it. Which means the super cool environment only increases the amount of power required about two times. Of course, this is an idealized 100% efficient process, but it's not as much of a difference as you'd imagine.
If you wanted to melt, say, a cylindrical hole 0.5 meters in diameter and have 66kW of power available and perfect efficiency, you can bore a cylindrical volume 0.5mm deep every second. This means you can tunnel the 20km in 1.2 years. If you can deal with say, 5-10 years it becomes very doable with technology not much more advanced than what we already have.
Of course, there just isn't any way to do this without nuclear power.
Yea, like the module while coming to Europa
It's ok, just put the cable in the probe instead of the surface module
>chances are effectively zero
Based on current data gathered from one (1) life-supporting planet.
Even if there's nothing there it will have been worth it to discover that.
The engineering research generated by that failure will feed back into the economy at a greater rate than if the funds had just been pent up in Cayman banks being used for the great retarded game of asset speculation.
Why not fire a bunch of nukes in succession at the same spot to smash up the ice then land the probe in the new surface ocean
No life began underground then cane out the hydro thermal vents.
Because a nuke is a terribly inefficient way to dig a deep, narrow hole. I mean, you can blast a hole the size of Wales in the ice to get 20km down while also actually ejecting the material, but just about any other method is going to be cheaper and less destructive. Not to mention the fact that nuking the place you want to find life in is generally counterproductive.
>MUH LIFE
fuck off nuke it already
Uranium is hot to the touch, just dump some on the ice and let it melt its way thru.
I don't know if you're being deliberately thick, but in case you're not:
The aim is to get a probe down there. Not to melt the ice. We want to study what is under the ice, not just make a big hole for shits a giggles.
>nuke Europa
>Earth gets invaded by giant pissed off Europan Space Squids
dickhead
>Europan Space Squids
Are they muslim?
