Draper Labs Develops Low Cost Probe To Orbit, Land On Europa For NASA 79
MarkWhittington writes Ever since the House passed a NASA spending bill that allocated $100 million for a probe to Jupiter's moon Europa, the space agency has been attempting to find a way to do such a mission on the cheap. The trick is that the mission has to cost less than $1 billion, a tall order for anything headed to the Outer Planets. According to a Wednesday story in the Atlantic, some researchers at Draper Labs have come up with a cheap way to do a Europa orbiter and land instruments on its icy surface.
The first stage is to orbit a cubesat, a tiny, coffee can sized satellite that would contain two highly accurate accelerometers that would go into orbit around Europa and measure its gravity field. In this way the location of Europa's subsurface oceans would be mapped. Indeed it is possible that the probe might find an opening through the ice crust to the ocean, warmed it is thought by tidal forces.
The second stage is to deploy even smaller probes called chipsats, tiny devices that contain sensors, a microchip, and an antenna. Hundreds of these probes, the size of human fingernails, would float down on Europa's atmosphere to be scattered about its surface. While some might be lost, enough will land over a wide enough area to do an extensive chemical analysis of the surface of Europa, which would then be transmitted to the cubesat mothership and then beamed to Earth.
The first stage is to orbit a cubesat, a tiny, coffee can sized satellite that would contain two highly accurate accelerometers that would go into orbit around Europa and measure its gravity field. In this way the location of Europa's subsurface oceans would be mapped. Indeed it is possible that the probe might find an opening through the ice crust to the ocean, warmed it is thought by tidal forces.
The second stage is to deploy even smaller probes called chipsats, tiny devices that contain sensors, a microchip, and an antenna. Hundreds of these probes, the size of human fingernails, would float down on Europa's atmosphere to be scattered about its surface. While some might be lost, enough will land over a wide enough area to do an extensive chemical analysis of the surface of Europa, which would then be transmitted to the cubesat mothership and then beamed to Earth.
NOOOOOOOO!!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
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Use them together, use them in peace.
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Not in the book. The PC addendum was only for the movie.
In the book there was no Cold War subplot.
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What's this "Book" thing you speak of, some Ancient form of communication or something? I've heard of it but don't really know what it is.
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Draper lands on Europa (Score:1)
Only mad men would attempt landings there
That's what I'm talkin' about! (Score:4, Informative)
That's science right there - all our best evidence indicates that this can be feasible, and this seems the least effort to try it. Nice plan to at least see how far we can get, before we have to revise and replan. We're testing just the principles we want to test, using established functionality where we aren't testing.
That's far more 'magical' to me, than promising another set of boots in places that won't be feasible without exactly these kinds of experiments happening first. More rovers - more measurements!
When we need to spend the big resources to send people off this gravity well, lets have it make sense, perhaps set up a semblance of an workable environment first. We can barely make earth-based closed etiologies last for long - it would be a sad excuse for a 'backup' with our current level of development. We absolutely CAN expand into the galaxy/universe - but we've still got a few mountains of puzzle pieces left unsorted still, in my particular opinion.
Ryan Fenton
Re:That's what I'm talkin' about! (Score:4, Insightful)
What is it with you religious types and your dog whistle language? "gravity well"?
And your space-addled brain sure picks some fancy words: "etiologies"??? You might want to look that one up!
" We absolutely CAN expand into the galaxy/universe "
LOL no "we" can't! Even if we could, evolution is still happening, what "we" are you talking about at those time scales?
And why is it important? It's never gonna happen.
Such a negative personality (I know, I know, "No, I'm not!"). The research to be done, technologies to be developed, and issues to be solved with becoming a space-faring race will pay us back many times over in solving the issues we have here on Earth.
"Religious types?" "dog whistle language?" I know you can type on a keyboard, but can you actually read for comprehension? I think not. If you could, you'd realize what a steaming load you're posting.
A bit of unsolicited advice for you, champ: 'tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.
Cheers!
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I think he can, but your comprehension of satire is lacking.
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I think he can, but your comprehension of satire is lacking.
Perhaps you're right and my satire detection skills were off. I might have parsed that if OP hadn't blathered: "LOL no "we" can't! Even if we could, evolution is still happening, what "we" are you talking about at those time scales? And why is it important? It's never gonna happen."
That's a trope most of the anti-intellectual, anti-science folks pull out, ad nauseam. And so, while I agree that the first part reads as pretty good satire, the last bit read just like a standard anti-rationalist moron rather
"It's never gonna happen." (Score:1)
Then what the hell are we waiting around for? If this is it, if this is the peak of human achievement, what a miserable peak it is. Let's just launch the nukes at one another and call it a day.
Good God. Trolls and Luddites.
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Not for us in the US it won't, because we don't do science/large scale engineering any more, but private efforts, perhaps in conjunction with governments in the BRIC countries, are going to make it happen
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Lack of engineers and scientists is not the problem we have. It's the power of Luddites and their lawyers. We would need to import enough Asians to one thinly populated area, say Nevada, to tip the political scales and render the Luddites powerless.
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We can barely make earth-based closed etiologies last for long
Who is this 'we'? If you mean NASA, that's 100% correct. But there's terrariums which have been sealed for decades. A couple of cubic feet. As a species, I think we have people capable of doing this. We're not hiring them.
Re:A waste of money, and irresponsible. (Score:4, Informative)
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it's a rounding error, a one off payment of 33 cents for every American.
That's what they said all of the other 130.000 times. That's why we need to make sure 100 millions worth of science is produced, in a sense that benefits a large number of citizens. Even pure expansion of knowledge is a valid benefit.
What you can't do is go around spending extracting cents out of your fellow citizens pockets on the presumption that they won't notice it. We have a democratic process that tries to weigh the interests and desires of all people; if you can't gather popular support for your pr
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Re:A waste of money, and irresponsible. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a waste of money, regardless, but considering the economy, it isn't a responsible use of taxpayer dollars, either.
Right. Because science is always a bad investment.
We should spend taxpayer money in military so we can steal from the countries that do advance technologically? Or what's your master plan on how to stay among the first instead of plummeting to the group of those countries that mostly serve as factories for the more advanced.
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" instead of plummeting to the group of those countries that mostly serve as factories for the more advanced."
Uh, have you seen our outsourcing numbers recently?
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Do you think Somalia outsurces much of it's manual labor to Norway?
Fun thought experiment but not practical (Score:4, Insightful)
Cubesat-sized stuff is so small mostly because it tosses overboard redundancy and rad-hardened components.
While it may work for short times on Earth orbit, sending a mini probe like this all the way to Jupiter (a very hostile radiation environment if there ever was one) sounds like a good way of wasting a launcher to me.
Now if they'd toss half a dozen of these, I might buy it that one or two will get to Europa orbit and may actually do something useful.
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Gee, I guess the engineers at NASA don't know about radiation levels at Jupiter. Lucky for them you posted about it on the internets. I'll forward them your post so they aren't left in the dark.
Re:Fun thought experiment but not practical (Score:5, Informative)
Gee, I guess the engineers at NASA don't know about radiation levels at Jupiter. Lucky for them you posted about it on the internets. I'll forward them your post so they aren't left in the dark.
Actually, OP is completely correct. I just sat in on a series of NASA talks on cubesats (NEPP, look it up) - they have huge problems with radiation and reliability because there isn't the budget for the testing and qualification that happens with typical satellites. Translation: 30% failure rate in benign environments. For reference, we're talking about systems that are (mostly) good up to 1-4 krads of ionizing dose, while projections I've seen for the Europa environment are ~ 2 Mrads. Or 2000 krads, if your metric is rusty. So we're talking about as much as 3 orders of magnitude more dose, with a system architecture that already experiences horrendous failure rates.
I don't know anything about Draper systems, but unless they've included mass budget for some serious shielding (look up JUNO and the "vault" they used for their electronics) there's no way this thing will last long enough to do useful science, if it even survives the trip there. It's entirely possible that this entire thing is the brainchild of a couple of postdocs who took some classes on spacecraft architectures but no nothing about how rad-hard electronic systems are actually developed.
Now, it's certainly possible that this project would be in a different class of cubesat, and they might be able to afford real, rad-hard components with Mrad range dose tolerance, but even so, Jupiter is one of the harshest radiation environments in the solar system, and satellites with traditional, expensive development cycles still have mission lifetimes of several months, tops. The only real way I could see them being successful is with rad-hard components and an extremely short mission profile - show up, dump the chipsats, and beam back some data as fast as possible before your electronics go insane and melt.
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Since NASA engineers didn't develop the probe in question, I fail to see how your comment is relevant. The probe in question was designed by Draper Labs, smart guys to be sure - but not known for their experience in designing deep space probes.
Re:Fun thought experiment but not practical (Score:4, Interesting)
Cubesat-sized stuff is so small mostly because it tosses overboard redundancy and rad-hardened components.
You can significantly rad-harden a device without adding weight. First, make sure the semiconductors use depleted boron [wikipedia.org]. Many off-the-shelf semiconductors already use Boron-11. Second, use any spare CPU cycles to run checksums on memory and FPGA bitstreams, to detect and restore flipped bits. Third, use a few cheap rad-harded 8-bit microcontrollers, such as 8051, for the most critical functions, such as the watchdog timer, and controlling the fallback RX/TX to Earth, including the ability to receive and install software patches. These 8-bit MCUs can be OTP with blown fuses, so there are no bits to flip.
"float down on Europa's atmosphere" (Score:3)
At least the chipsats turning into teeny little craters in the ice will reduce the data burden for the cubesat's transmitter, which based on those solar panels has a power budget of about a tenth of a watt to make a link at a range close to a billion kilometers. You can maybe squeeze a few hundred bits per second out of that while you're tying up a DSN dish, otherwise forget it.
Maybe they're thinking of making it an accessory to a full-size probe, but forgot to mention the need to send a few hundred kilograms of other stuff out there too. Or maybe somebody was behind on their press release quota, and this half-baked crap was the best thing they had lying around.
Re:"float down on Europa's atmosphere" (Score:5, Funny)
Um, are we talking about the same Europa here?
Maybe the Draper Labs guys misread the project definition.
"Europa??? we thought you meant Europe"
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Whichever destination, there's a lot of work to do before the final countdown.
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It's possible that the Draper plan could work, but there are lots of risks and uncertainties. Getting individual chipsats onto Europa's surface successfully and functioning is a big uncertainty. That they would have enough power to do some bit of science, and then transmit a result back to orbit successfully, is another. How are the chipsats going to be powered? Your average commercial 9-volt battery is not going to work on the surface of Europa.
The environment on Europa IS very cold and the radiation
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And sometimes, you end up with a random
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"which would then be transmitted to the cubesat mothership and then beamed to Earth."
furthermore, as you describe Europa, then galileo probes parachute would have been useless, the atmosphere is low but not totally so...
even I usually read the article blurb to the end.
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Galileo didn't have a parachute, and didn't soft land anywhere -- it was intentionally burned up in a high speed plunge into Jupiter's atmosphere. Perhaps you are thinking about the Cassini/Huygens probe of Titan, Saturn's largest moon which does have a dense atmosphere. I have to agree with the OP -- there is something not right about a plan to use Europa's practically non-existent atmosphere for this.
I find this approach unsettling (Score:3)
We've certainly left rovers and probes on other planets, and even intentionally crashed a couple on the moon. But raining hundreds of fingernail-sized chipsats on Europa kind of seems like cosmic littering. The debris from previous exploration missions have always felt large enough that we could go and pick it up if we were inclined (or capable) to do so. I know the truth is probably as bad or worse than this Europa mission, and I've probably subconsciously ignored that truth, but this just seems so willful
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Many of the 3rd stage boosters from Apollo are either in a heliocentric orbit [wikipedia.org], or smashed into the surface of the moon [nasa.gov] after the Command Module separated from them.
Historically, we aren't very good at not littering bits of spacecraft all over the place when we do these kinds of things.
Fail (Score:2)
Yep. Big fail here.
"Hundreds of these probes, the size of human fingernails, would float down on Europa's atmosphere to be scattered about its surface."
Europa doesn't have an atmosphere.
Often this kind of thing is only a misunderstanding in the summary, but, no, checking the article, that's what it says.
Sorry, no.
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They meant Europe (in Dutch: Europa). Small typo, happens to everybody.
Europe does have an atmosphere.
To save on launch cost they'll bring the cubesat by plane.
The rest of the 1 billion is beer and pizza money.
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That's the first thing I thought of too while reading the article. Usually some plan with such an obvious flaw doesn't make it past the press release editing at legitimate labs. Something odd is going on -- I'm waiting to see the reaction of the planetary science community, and either a "correction" issued or I stand by to be amazed at some facet of the physics of tenuous atmospheres which I did not know about.
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It would obviously have to be before 2620. After then, Uranus will be renamed.
NASA Kickstarter (Score:2)
Soundtrack to the stars (Score:2)
Power? (Score:2)
The answer to everything in science (Score:2)
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no. Nanobots made from graphene.
Didn't they do something like this in 'Twister' (Score:2)
Phase I study (Score:2)
It's not clear from the summary (or the linked article), but this isn't a mission at this point. This is a concept selected for Phase I study. [nasa.gov]
From the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) news release [nasa.gov]:
"NIAC Phase I awards are approximately $100,000, providing awardees the funding needed to conduct a nine-month initial definition and analysis study of their concepts. If the basic feasibility studies are successful, proposers can apply for Phase II awards, which provide up to $500,000 for two more years o
"Coffee Can" (Score:2)
Ya gotta love it when Americans try to talk down to each other about stuff t
Under 1B is hard? (Score:2)
So... exactly why is it so "hard" to do this for under $1B? Launch costs are well known and are a small fraction of $1B. We have now sent dozens of probes to the planets so at the least the guidance and exterior should be well known. What else is left? Are instrumentation and mission support? Are we really needing to reinvent the wheel for each new mission? Is it that difficult to re-use (or at least upgrade) existing sensors and cameras?
All of this should be put out to worldwide bid.