NASA Gets $75 Million For Europa Mission 135
astroengine writes "It may not be a lander or an orbiter, but its something. Europa, one of Jupiter's largest moons, has been the focus of much scrutiny over its potential life-bearing qualities. It has an icy crust over a liquid water ocean and now salts have been detected on its surface, suggesting a cycling of nutrients from the surface to the interior. This only amplifies the hypothesis that Europa not only could support basic life, it could support complex life. But how can we find out? The proposed Europa Clipper received interest at NASA HQ last year as it would optimize the science while keeping the mission budget under $2 billion. It would be a spacecraft that will be in orbit around Jupiter, but make multiple flybys of Europa to assess the moon for its habitable qualities. Now, in a bill signed by President Obama and approved by lawmakers, $75 million has been allocated (for the remainder of this fiscal year) for a 'Jupiter Europa mission.' Could it represent the seed money for the Europa Clipper? We'll have to wait and see."
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Who?
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Re:Countdown (Score:5, Funny)
Warning (Score:3, Interesting)
"All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there."
Re:Warning (Score:5, Funny)
"All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there."
I knew I should have made that left turn at Albuquerque.
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That last one went over my head.
Albuquerque?
Bugs Bunny
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That last one went over my head.
Albuquerque?
lol, I know I'm getting older when...
Re:Over my head ... (Score:4, Funny)
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In Before 2001 Space Odyssey References... (Score:2, Funny)
In Before 2001 Space Odyssey References...
Don't hide the truth NASA...you found a monolith on the moon didn't you?
$75 Million huh? (Score:1)
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Also, reading the summary [loc.gov], I stumbled across this gem in the bill (now law), funding for "former Soviet Union cooperative threat reduction".
Re:$75 Million huh? (Score:4, Informative)
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Europa is tough. It is theorized that there are several kilometers of ice above the liquid oceans. But they could be slushy instead, or who knows. So the first priority is doing a detailed survey to find out where the ocean begins. Once that is known, then ideas like cryobots [wikipedia.org] can be developed to penetrate into it. An orbiter might be able to use very large solar arrays, but an RTG is more likely. For a cryobot, a nuclear reactor will be needed. Both of these will cost billions, so the $75 million is just ho
Re:$75 Million huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. We're a long ways away from having the technical know-how to drill through several kilometers of ice (and lets' face it, we really have no idea how thick the ice "crust" may be), either by robot or even manned mission. First things first.
I think something like Cassini–Huygens is probably the way to go. If I was in charge and had a good budget, I'd probably have two probes; a lander that could attempt some surface measurements, perhaps land near where surface ice is the youngest for possible signs of biological activity, and a seismometer onboard. The other probe would just smash into the moon to try to ring it like a gong to get some good seismic readings that ought to reveal more about the thickness of the ice crust, the depth of the liquid ocean beneath and data on the core. You would also have the main spaceship which could fly around the Jovian system for several years, get some data on some of the other cool Jovian satellites.
At some point we'll be able to get a probe to the liquid ocean on Europa, but until then we can take some good initial steps like we've done with Titan.
Re:$75 Million huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. We're a long ways away from having the technical know-how to drill through several kilometers of ice (and lets' face it, we really have no idea how thick the ice "crust" may be), either by robot or even manned mission.
I don't think it's technical know-how so much as the cost to get the drill payload there. Scientists drilled through a kilometer of antarctic ice sheet to explore the lake beneath, so we have the know-how.
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But even drilling into the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets took considerable effort, and that was with manned crews who could be on site to manage the process. The best we can do right now is have a lander that can drill a few inches into the surface. While I think that might be valuable, particularly as it seems likely that at least some areas of Europa's surface are geologically active (and thus we might get some signature of any complex chemistry going on in the ocean deep underneath), I still think w
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Scientists drilled through a kilometer of antarctic ice sheet to explore the lake beneath, so we have the know-how.
I'd have to disagree. That drill probably involves tens of tons of metal from the drilling platform to the well shaft to the bits. Now try to drill through a kilometer of ice with at most a few hundred kilograms of stuff for everything.
If I were doing it, the drill would just be a large piece of plutonium 238 (or maybe some other radioactive isotope with a shorter half life) completely encased with something hardcore chemically inert like platinum or iridium. There'd be a reel of fiber optic playing out
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Why not a two part probe: half is a broadcast station to relay info home, the other half is a capsule with a spool of wire (fiber, whatever), and RTG, and whatever science tools are feasible.
The probe lands, splits into two, and the RTG side just sort of melts/sinks its way in with the spool playing out wire to the surface station. Spool has to be on the sinker side because the ice will refreeze on the wire as you go. Don't know how long it would take for it to sink say... 2 kilometers, but assuming it m
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It may be more expensive to man a 5-year monitoring effort than to build a hotter sinker to speed up the process.
If I could expand your proposal a bit - once it's past the ice, let the second stage attach to the bottom of the ice sheet and spread out a bunch of antennas, and then drop a third-stage ROV to do the actual exploration. I think that would call for a total of three RTG's, but it would probably be worth the effort for expanded range. The main melting RTG would double as the ROV's power source, s
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I had read about that. I think there are concerns about contamination, not to mention launching a pretty powerful radioactive payload.
Sigh, things would be a lot easier if we had mining, refining and spaceship/probe assembly plants in orbit.
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Sigh, things would be a lot easier if we had mining, refining and spaceship/probe assembly plants in orbit.
Well, yes.
I love how when it comes to space technology, you get people making breathtakingly sweeping handwaves to get round problems. "It's just engineering". No shit. Just because something's not made of magic and fairy dust doesn't mean it's feasible.
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I think getting a good idea of the internal structure of Europa should be the first order of business, and that's where the whole seismograph-impactor idea comes from. Besides, if you can get a probe to smack into Europa at a reasonably decent speed you might be able to get some good spectrographic data from the ice cloud it produces.
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A long way from having the technical knowledge to drill through the ice?
In space, no one can hear you *sigh*
Take one small solid fuel strap-on rocket. Strap on small asteroid. Aim, Fire, from space, at orbital velocities.
*After* you've checked to make sure that you're not right above one of the Europans sub-ice cities, and that the Monolith's not there.....
mark
wrong. (Score:2)
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An orbiter might be able to use very large solar arrays, but an RTG is more likely. For a cryobot, a nuclear reactor will be needed.
Wouldn't it be possible to generate power from the planet flying through the magnetic field of Jupiter?
Fhloston Paradise (Score:1, Funny)
Why so expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
I am a huge fan of NASA and wish the budgets between the Pentagon and NASA were switched...more bombing runs on other planets, less on our own. But why is everythng a $2 billion (before inevitable overruns) project?
Each planetary mission is somehat different, but it really seems to me that they are re-inventing the wheel every time. What about standardizing on a vehicle platform, with some set instrumentation and a little room for customization if necessary. Make each one substantial enough (RTG's for power) And then start firing these off to Mercury, moons of Jupiter, Saturn, where-ever.
The launch cost of an Atlas V or Delta IV is somehere in the neighborhood of $150 million, so the other $1.8 billion is for mission development and support?
SpaceX, here's a tip...get into the science mission hardware game too.
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Uh, if Toyota redesigned the Camry every year from they'd go bankrupt. I'm just saying use and reuse a platform over and over agian to save costs. Cassini has been pretty successful, dust off those blueprints and plug in the coordinates for Europa.
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There is no "dust of those blueprints and plug in the coordinates for Europa" The "blu
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If your thinking was employed 40 years ago would we have ever moved past Voyager?
I think we would be well ahead of where we are today because we'd be building infrastructure and doing space exploration instead of one off disposable technology development. To be blunt, the space science and exploration community is profoundly ignorant of economics and that has hurt us a lot.
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Reusing old designs would save less than 10% of the cost
I don't know where you get that from. R&D is traditionally a lot more than 10% of the cost. Most of that goes away with reuse of the design. Then you have economies of scale from building multiple copies of the same design.
To be blunt, you have no idea what you are talking about. Do you honestly believe you're that much smarter than everyone at NASA?
I didn't say that. I merely said space scientists, which would include those at NASA, are profoundly ignorant of economic matters. That is evident from their actions.
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Yes, its effing hard, but they've also been doing it for 40 effing years. Pretty much have that Newtonian physics part down to be able to get these things in orbit around most of the hevaenly bodies in the solar system. The cameras from Cassini are pretty nice, as is the data relay, power gen and so on. So why not re-use the cassin design and plug in new coordinates?
If NASA keeps developing effing $2 billion projects they won't effing get any money from the effing congress. They don't have the
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In other words, you are talking about thousands of man-years of highly skilled labor
In other words, if we cut a few orders of magnitude off the R&D per vehicle, we'd end up with a much cheaper vehicle. Here's my counter proposal. We put a small team together for a few man-months to man-years, depending on the problem and they put a prototype together.
It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough to fit some generous mission constraints.
Once they're done, we stick it in orbit and see what happens. A few more more man-months to man-years to iron out the difficulties discovered.
Expensive? (Score:2)
We Come in Peace! (Score:2)
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This is already being done.
I admit using the rather inefficient organic assemblers is currently slowing the process down a bit.
Things should speed up once we get the mechanical assemblers working on the problem.
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Because building one-of-a-kind equipment designed to operate for years in extreme environments is hellishly expensive.
That's like taking a submarine and giving it wheels so
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Exactly.
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Fine for those things that you only need WalMart quality for,
Space probes should fall solidly in that category. If you look at most science done in the world, it's not pretty and it sure as hell isn't made of perfect, 4 meter titanium I-beams. I think we'll start seeing some real space science once mission costs drop about two orders of magnitude.
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An orbiter around Mercury is 80+ percent different than an orbiter for Titan which is probably 90 percent different from a flyby for Pluto.
But an orbiter around Mercury isn't going to be much different from an orbiter around Venus or flyby's of inner system asteroids and sungrazing comets. Similarly, an orbiter for Titan would be useful for all sorts of work around the gas giants. You could send one to Chiron [wikipedia.org] or the Trojan asteroids [wikipedia.org]. And the vehicle for the Pluto flyby could be flying by some of the other notable Kuiper Belt objects [wikipedia.org].
It doesn't take much imagination to come up with similar missions. It does take a little ambition, planning,
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That's why "commodity" was in quotes - because relative to the rest of the industry, that's what it is. It's not just about materials, but how they're used... better tank designs, mass produced on automated equipment, re-use within the same vehicle of the same components with minor modifications (if any)... e
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So, when you have nothing to say intelligently, you resort to trying to put-downs. Okay.
First off, what engineering issues are there with SpaceX vs. say Ares I or Atlas V?
One thing that you should realize is that hand production makes for issues with quality. OTOH, mass production on very accurate automated equipment means reproducability.
Sadly, your own fanbozism is getting in the way of clear thought on this. SpaceX's record is actually not that much different than any others. Yes, they had is
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SpaceX (Score:2)
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Because you don't have the leg room to build crazy things like gps, or microwaves, or lasers, or cell phones, or all the other things we take for granted today because the NASA of 50 years ago was faced with a challenge and had the budget to over come it.
Nonsense. GPS is DoD not NASA. Microwaves, lasers, cell phones, etc were developed anyway.
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Consider geostationary orbits are around 42,000 km away.
Jupiter is at least 630,000,000 km away.
So what? Distances in space aren't like distances on Earth. If I drive ten times as far on Earth, I use ten times as much fuel. But I can fly orders of magnitude beyond geostationary orbit without using significantly more fuel. Escape velocity from the Solar System itself is roughly as much delta v from low Earth orbit (LEO) as LEO is from the surface of the Earth. And there are a variety of circumstances that make that a much simpler problem propulsion-wise (Orberth effect, high efficiency propulsion witho
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So leaving the Solar System is less than twice as hard propulsion-wise as getting to orbit. Getting there in a timely fashion with working gear makes those sorts of problems harder. But merely being four orders of magnitude further away just isn't that big a deal. If you can get your stuff working in space in isolation for long periods of time, you have it.
How are you going to get the mass of the propellant into LEO? For every pound of payload (which in this case, includes the propellant to go from LEO to an escape trajectory from the solar system) it's something like 50 times as much propellant you need. So even if the propellant you needed was only 10% of what you needed to get into LEO, you would still need a launch vehicle that has 5 times as much propellant.
Hand-waving the time issue away is a big reach as well. Good luck getting anyone to spend a si
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How are you going to get the mass of the propellant into LEO?
Launch it. It's mass. We already know how to get mass into orbit. We also have some pretty good ideas on how to store propellant in space.
Hand-waving the time issue away is a big reach as well.
We already have probes that have lasted long enough. It's a solved problem.
Good luck getting anyone to spend a significant amount of money now for something that may pay off in 30-40 years.
The original post was about sending a unmanned Dragon capsule-based probe to Jupiter. It'll take 5 years or less. That's in a lot of peoples' investment horizons. I don't expect anything resembling a financial profit, but you'd see in a few years your spacecraft do what it's intended to do.
So su
Getting Through That Ice Cover (Score:1)
Re:Getting Through That Ice Cover (Score:5, Funny)
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direct link (Score:5, Informative)
"For necessary expenses, not otherwise provided for, in the conduct and support of science research and development activities, including research, development, operations, support, and services; maintenance and repair, facility planning and design; space flight, spacecraft control, and communications activities; program management; personnel and related costs, including uniforms or allowances therefor, as authorized by sections 5901 and 5902 of title 5, United States Code; travel expenses; purchase and hire of passenger motor vehicles; and purchase, lease, charter, maintenance, and operation of mission and administrative aircraft, $5,144,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2014, of which up to $14,500,000 shall be available for a reimbursable agreement with the Department of Energy for the purpose of re-establishing facilities to produce fuel required for radioisotope thermoelectric generators to enable future missions: Provided, That $75,000,000 shall be for pre-formulation and/or formulation activities for a mission that meets the science goals outlined for the Jupiter Europa mission in the most recent planetary science decadal survey: Provided further, That the formulation and development costs (with development cost as defined under section 30104 of title 51, United States Code) for the James Webb Space Telescope shall not exceed $8,000,000,000: Provided further, That should the individual identified under subsection (c)(2)(E) of section 30104 of title 51, United States Code, as responsible for the James Webb Space Telescope determine that the development cost of the program is likely to exceed that limitation, the individual shall immediately notify the Administrator and the increase shall be treated as if it meets the 30 percent threshold described in subsection (f) of section 30104."
Contamination (Score:3, Insightful)
At least they aren't planning on landing (yet).... If there's no life before we land a spacecraft on the Europa, there will be afterwards.
We should probably become better at sterilizing [nytimes.com] our spacecraft [highbeam.com] before we land one on a moon where water is known to exist, and seed its oceans with earth-based life.
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At least they aren't planning on landing (yet).... If there's no life before we land a spacecraft on the Europa, there will be afterwards.
We should probably become better at sterilizing [nytimes.com] our spacecraft [highbeam.com] before we land one on a moon where water is known to exist, and seed its oceans with earth-based life.
you know, that kind of philosophical statement needs to answer the question why the fuck would that be a problem, what do you know about how they're going to sterilize and do you propose we sterilize this planet first? and how would we know if we have sterilized well enough?
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It would be a problem because if we go looking for life we'll find the contaminations we brought, and it'll be difficult to tell if life arose on Europa or not.
As they're not landing I assume they won't be sterilizing the craft at all.
Why would we sterilize the planet?
The last question is interesting, we could use the same techniques we plan on using to find life on the planet to see if any show up on the spacecraft, although no matter how good you can do it, the possibility remains that in (some) years tim
Final step - Io Flyby? (Score:2)
Interesting cost comparison (Score:5, Interesting)
$75 million will buy a little more than 3 F-16 Falcon fighter jets. [af.mil]
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I don't know what the current numbers are, but at one point we were spending almost on defense as the rest of the world...COMBINED! I think we accounted for 47% of world defense/intel spending.
Re:Interesting cost comparison (Score:4, Interesting)
The height of the cold war was a different time. We have far fewer, far older aircraft and ship hulls today. We now spend more than 3x as much in checks sent to the poor and the old (many of whom are not poor) as we do on defense and wars. What most people think of as government spending: freeways, NASA, federal court system, etc, all together is small in comparison.
Very round numbers in $Trillions:
2.2 - Mailing checks to old and poor people
0.7 - Defense and wars
0.2 - Interest on the debt (at record low interest rates)
0.5 - Everything else the government does
The tiny NASA budget is just a glimse into the problem: the federal government is a pension plan with a military, and everything else is a dwindling afterthought. Oh, and let's not forget:
2.5 - Total federal revenue - no amount of cutting that "everything else" bucket will make this balance.
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Your first number, "Mailing checks to old and poor people", completely ignores the fact that most of that comes out of the Social Security Trust Fund,
By "most" do you mean "less than 1/3rd, if we pretend there really is a trust fund"?
There are no marketable securities in the trust fund any more, just an IOU where the money was spent from the Reagan-though-Bush2 presidencies. Any check that social security sends out going forward must be directly funded by taxes or borrowing by the general fund. The young pay the old, a direct transfer from the less-wealthy to the more-wealthy (on average). People seem OK with that.
But either way, Social Security is onl
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What is needed is to return our taxes to sanity and make some other cuts, while doing some smart investments.
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Re:Interesting cost comparison (Score:5, Informative)
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I want to see the fishies! (Score:2)
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I am not a scientist, but I don't get the wank fest with Mars. We can go there and hope to find fossils, or we can go to Europa or Encelaedus [sic] and *maybe* find a live specimen.
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Also has an atmosphere, which makes landing a lot easier and cheaper, and an average temperature that our equipment can deal with.
Actually, the Martian atmosphere is a huge hinderance, and one of the reasons why so many missions have failed. The fundamental problem is that Mars has just enough atmosphere that you need to deal with it (heat shields, atmospheric entry, etc...) but not enough to actually be useful for anything. This is how you end up with rube-goldbergesque landing systems like what MSL used.
Landing on a planetary body without an atmosphere is actually much simpler, as you can just do a pure rocket descent. May not be
“Cool, except it should be Enceladus!” (Score:4, Informative)
- Carolyn Porco
To get good information on Europa, you really need a lander. You might not even need to drill - organics may flow up from the ocean and get frozen in the crust. But a lander is necessary to get actual samples. In fact, if they send that Curiosity clone they're planning to Europa instead of Mars again, it might get much more interesting results!
Enceladus, on the other hand, is like Soviet Russia: Because of its geysers, samples go to you.
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To get good information on Europa, you really need a lander. You might not even need to drill - organics may flow up from the ocean and get frozen in the crust. But a lander is necessary to get actual samples. In fact, if they send that Curiosity clone they're planning to Europa instead of Mars again, it might get much more interesting results!
There may be some fun 10 meter long ice blades [bbc.co.uk] ("penitentes") on the surface of Europa that would be amazing to see close up (though maybe not so great to land on). Dr Hobley: "We are expecting a band around the equator where it is spiky."
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But to get the answers the lander designers will need to know before they can design their equipment - you need flybys if not an orbiter. One step at a time, each building on the last.
Why orbit Jupiter? (Score:1)
Re:Why orbit Jupiter? (Score:4, Interesting)
Meh.. (Score:2)
Could it represent the seed money for the Europa Clipper?
It'd be so much cooler if it represented the seed money for a full scale Panther Clipper. [alioth.net]
Red Dragon instead (Score:2)
Don't turn the lights on (Score:2)
Why flybys? (Score:1)
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$75 Million to get to Europa! (Score:1)
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Won't the people in Europe be surprised when we land there and plant a flag? I mean, other then the French.