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emmett
from the all-these-worlds-are-yours-except-europa dept.
rhet writes, "NASA may deliberately crash the $1.5 billion Galileo spacecraft which is exploring Jupiter to avoid contaminating the moon Europa. Scientists believe simple life forms may exist on Europa. There is evidence that Europa has an ocean beneath its ice crust. Read more about it here."
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Why can't they just leave it up there orbitting and taking pictures? Is it running out of fuel? The article makes no reference to that. Are we really better off with another piece of space junk, even if it's not orbitting Earth?
I suppose given their current track record with crash landing expensive satelites and recon vehicales, they figure this is one operation they cannot screw up.
I just hope they dont miss and send it flying off into deep space.
I announced that I'll be purposely crashing my '87 Yugo into Lake Erie to avoid hurting my image. Seriously though, what a waste of taxpayer money. There's no other way to avoid Europa?
Keep in mind that this craft is 11 years old...it's ancient in terms of spacecraft. It's original 2 year mission was extened another 2 years and is AGAIN being extened 2 more years...so we definatly got our money's worth out of it...and then some. we got 4 extra years out of a space craft that traveled a great distance, don't complain, we should retire it with dignity and honour.
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I think they should try put it into a solar orbit, so that it could be salvaged and put on display a century or two from now. Let's face it: Galileo is one of the most successful space probes ever built. Sure, it was expensive, but look at what we learned from it, despite the major malfunctions it faced early on.
And let's not forget exactly where all that money it cost goes to: paying people's paychecks. The dollars aren't used as rocket fuel, y'know.
Damnation, if we ever do find life anywhere else in the universe, we're going to be too timid to study it. This craft has been in the vacuum of space for what, 10 years? And bathed in poisonous radiation most all of that time. I highly doubt that the craft is carrying a microbe that can live in a vacuum, live in radiation, survive a supersonic crash, and live in ice cold water. That would have to be one helluva amoeba.
On the contrary, I'd see how low I could get Galileo to orbit Europa. Then I'd try to edge lower and lower until it crashed.
I'm impressed that they're considering that course of action - it shows some real foresight. Europa, if inhabited (by any life) could be enormously useful ('uncontaminated') by virtue of being a huge, somewhat isolated biosphere. In addition, this is some real respect for the universe, a big thing we don't quite understand. Let's not mess up another rock if we don't need to. And why would we need to?
Scientists warn we shouldn't rev ourselves into a tizzy over this. Any life on Europa, they assure us, is of the single-celled variety, at best. Of course, such a declaration is clearly just a smokescreen to prevent us from reaching the obvious conclusion: At this very moment, super-intelligent giant squid have their siege-rockets poised beneath Europa?s half-mile ice shell, ready to launch their imperialist onslaught. These sub-mariner beasts intend to take control of our peace-loving planet and mine us for the rich iron supplies stored in our hemoglobin. Yes, the jovian devil-fish plan to render our blood for precious structural iron, needed to build more of their planet-hoppers. Their ultimate plan: To flood the canals of Mars as a space-squid vacation resort.
At night I can hear the transmissions from their communications satellites resonating in my fillings; the hideous, scheming clacking of their beaks has rendered sleep an unattainable fantasy. They intend to devour our dogs whole and use our sports-utility vehicles as punch-bowls for their post-conquest banquet. They monitor our radio transmissions, love our mariachi music, and yet despise our hip-hop. These are truly monsters.
How long will the scientific community continue to feign ignorance of this exo-cephalopodic threat looming under Europa?s dark plutonian shores? And how long will it be until our own squid-- trusted friend and snack-- turn on us? As the first earth-dweller to fully recognize the very real threat of worldwide Europan conquest, I enjoin you: We must take up arms against this sea of troubles, and by opposing, end it.
Too bad they didn't put Galileo into quarantine or clean her up before sending her off, it'd be at least as interesting to see what we could find out about Europa (by crashing Galileo into it) as whatever we learn about whatever moon/planet we do end up crashing it into (if any).
I think that moving Galileo out of the range of Jupiter would be the most commendable thing. First off, it is still capable of gathering/sending information. Secondly, we've lost two of the three Mars missions. Question is then can Galileo properly do those missions?
If scientists can successfully bring it back through the asteroid belt and in tact to complete at least on of those failed missions, then it shows the versatility of the "new NASA". Galileo has already proven its ability in completing various missions, why not one more before it gets destroyed.
Personally, if saving Galileo is a priority and bringing it back would work, I believe that NASA could save face and return hope to the Mars priority it's been running with these past few years. Plus I'd like to be around when "The Martian Chronicles" begins to actually come to pass.
This Headline implies that NASA it wasting money on 'shooting' probes out just to crash them now.
Remember that Galileo has done it's purpose and to avoid a possible extraterrestrial contamination of another celestial body that possibly may supporting life, they decided to crash it into another planet that (most likely) does not support any life.
NASA isn't in the habit of building something just to throw it away for no good reason. Sure, they make mistakes, but NASA is still ran by humans, and humans make 'human errors.' The technological feats that they have done (and are still doing) boggles the mind. (I'd like to see you calculate the exact vector to break orbit and travel to Jupiter over the course of 2 years with only 2 minutes of burn-time)
NASA is still going strong and I feel quite happy that my tax-dollars are being pourned into it. (Besides they brought us TANG!;-) )
if you read the article: galileo has been around since '89.. it has completed it's mission..
and they evaluating scenarios to ensure europa won't be contamined.. one of them being to deliberatly crash an old spacecraft..
don't start nagging again that the US government is wasting money.. it would be a much greater loss to lose/blur evidence about alien lifeforms on europa.
This is very refreshing news. That fact that they are willing and seem to be very committed to sacrificing this very expensive satellite in order to keep Europa pristine shows that it is science, and not politics, that rules the show at NASA. And this is _exactly_ as it should be.
And to those who complain of waste, Galileo is over 10 years old. It has already accomplished its original mission as well as a two year extension. I think this noble-minded idea is a fit end to its career.
Why couldn't they just redirect it when the Millennium Mission is complete in February 2001? With such a success, (NASA needs a few) why crash it in to Jupiter, there has to be some value the old warhorse can provide. It'd be a shame to end this program.
Nice to see that NASA has finally woken up to the problem of space rubbish around other planets. If Gallileo does have Earth-born bacteria on it which have survived in space (there are various theories about life spreading from planet to planet by this method) it would be extremely frustrating to disrupt any current ecosystem on Europa. On the other hand, this concern will make the job of examining Europa in the future more tricky, regardless of what they do with Galileo (dropping it into the Jovian atmosphere or crashing it into Io both sound like possibilities to gain interesting data on either planet/moon). If we are going to go explore Europa for signs of life, we are almost certainly going to have to do it remotely with 'sterilized' equipment - sending a few astronauts down to have look isn't going to help in the attempts to not disrupt any life already there.
Of course, our own orbit is now strewn with bits of satellites and rocket boosters - thankfully it all tends to wander around at the same speeds as the spacecraft in orbit, but it gets a little bit unnerving to wonder about the future of colonizing the galaxy when you have to dodge the last 100 years of waste products in getting started.
Wouldn't any microbes from earth that made it onto the spacecraft by now have been killed by cosmic radiation? The craft has been in space for several years now. Even the most hardy microbes should have perished by now?
Even if microbes did make it through space and survice an impact what is the chances that any alien life would be compatible with ours?
Wow... an amazing short-sighted look at the space industry and government. Let's see... if we give money to the space industry, they'll start more projects. As a result more jobs are created. This lets people work and possibly get off wellfare to do the factory work created either directly or indirectly by the NASA projects. Helps our economy and therefore pays for itself. It's people like toofast that should be strapped to next rocket and get a firsthand look at the wonders of outer space.
What's a few million here and there? It probably won't make a serious dent in NASA's budget, and if anything will help them explain why they should get more money next year.
Seriously, though, what would happen if we get there and all we find is a single alien village with a lot of corpses and a wrecked satellite?
Oops!
Do they really have a choice? I know a lot of us are pissed off that three cents of our tax money is going toward possibly saving a lifeform other than humans, but isn't that -- objectively speaking -- the wisest decision?
You will probably find as much money between the cushions on your sofa as you have invested into this project. Chill out, people.
Since the main objective will be already completed (observing Jupiter), the probe served it's usefulness already. They have nothing to lose if they do crash it, but a very very slim chance that Europa is contaminated if they don't. If by some chance it does crash on Europa, when a future mission explorers the moon for life, it would be difficult to say with scientific certainty what was observed did not come from this probe. If it doesn't crash, it will just continue on into blackness as other NASA probes have in the past. Nothing is going to be wasted.
I an not a scientist, so I do not claim to understand the specific problems involved with this situation. I leave the control of this spacecraft in the hands of those who actually understand the situation.
As for the cost, yes, $1.5 billion is a lot of money. But divided equally amoung the population of the USA, it comes out to about $5 per person (figuring 300 million people). This project has already done quite a bit. I think it has been worth my $5.
As a long-time faithful reader of Slash-Dot, I have been increasingly disturbed as of late by the 'Slash-Dot Effect' that seems to have afflicted Slash-Dot its very self!
Please, for the sake of your numerous readers, replace your "Lin-ux" servers and "perl" with Windows 2000 and ASP so that we will no longer need to deal with un-bearable load times.
I cannot imagine what thoughts must be traversing the neural pathways of the good people at NASA / JPL. Do they really, honestly and truly believe that a couple thousand pounds of irradiated metal and silicon could really have an impact on Europa? Puhleeeze.
Now the real question in my mind, when the slam Galileo into Jupiter, will I be able to get it on Pay Per View?
That may be a good official reason but we all know the real reason.
NASA is afraid of the class action suit that some spaceprobe-chasing lawyers would start on behalf of all the non-terrestrial life-forms that the crash had affected.
Is it true NASA stands for Not Another Space Accident?
Excuse me? Why not crash it into Europa? Cataclysmic events have been responsible for most evolutionary jumps on Earth - why not give Europa a chance to develop life more progressed than simple lifeforms, so that at least one body in this solar system develops an intelligence that can become star-faring?
After all, with the NASA budget shrinking every year, this rock will die when the moon crashes into the surface anyway.
I agree that this is a wise course of action (or at least wise to consider), but I don't agree that it shows foresight. Quite the opposite.
REAL foresight would have been sending the probe out clean to begin with so that contamination would never be an issue. You may argue that they had no idea Galileo would make it this far. I have two responses to that:
1) "We'll never need more than 640KB of RAM" 2) Even if you never made it to Europa, why risk contaminating space itself? There are a lot of people studying space-borne life and having microbe-infested spaceships zooming around probably doesn't help much. -- Here is the result of your Slashdot Purity Test.
Just because we're moderately advanced versions of good old-fashioned chimpanzees doesn't give us the exclusive rights to destroy life wherever we discover it. And has anyone considered the possibility that, if there is single-celled life on Europa, it may very well be quite deadly to humans? Single celled life forms that coexist with us peacefully only do so after millions of years of coevolution... a good parasite never kills its host. Don't bite the hand that feeds you. Not that it matters, really, since we aren't sending people there. Yet.
I'm wondering if we can turn this into a big experiment... try to closely recreate the conditions on Earth that led to the evolution of intelligent life. Gently tip the scales of evolution so that, in a few hundred million years (after we have long been extinct), a new race of intelligent creatures will rise up and discover the remains of our civilization. Our people would be sort of cosmic parents. Or not.
I said it before, and i'll say it again: Moderation just doesn't work. Stupid posts like this get high ratings thanks to karma bonuses, while meanwhile, good posts like this one [slashdot.org] and this one [slashdot.org] starve at 1, where no moderators ever see them.
love the sig... black hole was one of my FAVES growing up.. what DID V.I.N.C.E.N.T stand for again.. i remember reading a kids book based on the flim and it said what it was..
Wouldn't any microbes from earth that made it onto the spacecraft by now have been killed by cosmic radiation? The craft has been in space for several years now. Even the most hardy microbes should have perished by now?
We don't know. That's the point.
Even if microbes did make it through space and survice an impact what is the chances that any alien life would be compatible with ours?
We don't know. That's the point. There is no basis (yet) on which to judge those odds. Anyone who says otherwise is indulging in a WAG whether they admit it or not.
Why take any chance? Though it's functioned way beyond it's expected time, the craft is nearing the end of its usefulness. It's time to clean up after ourselves. For a change.
Nasa Scientist A: I'm getting bored at looking at Jupiter
Nasa Scientist B: I know what you mean, same old same odl
A: Mind you those comets that smashed into it were pretty cool B: Yeah, 11 years watching and its all clouds and methane, where is the fun in that ? A: We need to do something exciting.
Enter Military Man C
C: Hi Guys, anything new ? A: Nope, just a big red dot and a possible ocean. B: And of course the black bits. C: Okay I'll be off. A: Hang On, we're just wondering how to make this job more interesting, any ideas ? C: Well you could take the military approach... B: Which is ? C: If it costs over a billion dollars, make sure it crashes, we did it with the Stealth Fighters and Bombers, its the whole purpose of the ICBMs. And they make WAY cool noises and pretty lights when they go up. A: You mean you crash these things on purpose ? C: Sure sometimes, but we video everything just incase we get lucky by accident.
And that ladies and gentlemen was how the plan was formed.
Does anyone else think that country is worthy of ridicule, that will crash $1.5 billion of equipment to avoid even the remote chance that it might hurt some single-celled bacteria, and then legalize the destruction of millions of unborn babies?
Does anyone else think that country is worthy of ridicule, that will crash $1.5 billion of equipment to avoid even the remote chance that it might hurt some single-celled bacteria, and then legalize the destruction of millions of unborn babies? Do those mythical one-celled motes from outer space have more rights than human children?
Well, first of all with the cost argument, the space craft is 11 years old, was only intended to be used for 2 years, so in essence, you got 9 years free, can't beat that deal...
I know you're going after the abortion deal, which is really disturbing, whether or not you believe abortion should be legal (I really don't, with some exceptions) you must keep in mind, these are OUR offspring, any life on another planet is NOT ours, and therefore we have more right to destroy our stuff then their stuff. I know it sounds draconian but really thats the way it is.
There are no life forms on any of those moons. This is incredibly stupid.
A member of the Galileo imaging team says NASA are considering crashing the spacecraft into Jupiter or one of its icy moons in 2002 because it might still contain microbes from Earth.
Great. So those microbes take a plunge on to a new planet. Fast forward 5 billion years, and those microbes have populated Jupiter and have created life on an otherwise lifeless planet. We've just infected Jupiter!
"Just to be sure, they want to get rid of it and make sure it doesn't go into Europa, where we have a possible habitat of some kind of extraterrestrial life."
Soooooo.....What happens if the crash site is currently occupied with Life Forms that we DON'T suspect, hmm? So in an ironic ending to the life of Galileo, it crashes into a planet with life forms and introduces extra-Jupiterian life to divide and conquer.
Or, we could send it off into deep space, and discover it 300 years from now as a tremendous space probe named G'leo.
I can see the conversation between NASA and the spacecraft now:
Galileo: Well, I've put in my long hard years for the company, and after having put it off for a few years, I think it's time to retire and start collecting social security.
NASA: That's good, because we were coming up with a spectacular retirement package for you.
Galileo: Great, so what does my golden parachute look like?
Yep, I think the problem is that they will soon not be able to control it at all and they'd rather just make sure it crashes into Jupiter or Io rather than try to put it into some kind of 'stable/permanent' orbit that might decay over time for some unforeseen reason (passing of an unknown comet) and end up falling into Europa and possibly causing biological contamination. (Yeah, I know but someone already said there is a theory which says it might be possible for bacteria to still be viable, even after 11 years in the frozen vacuum of space.)
Makes sense to me. It's already performed it's original mission and then some so it's not like wasting billions of dollars when this craft is 11 years old and has reached the end of it's useful life anyway. Rather than letting this thing float around as so much space junk, they are thinking about of 'disposing' of it as best they can at this point. Plunge it into Jupiter, take a few snapshots on the way in for the evening news. So what's the diff? Option A) have a dead spacecraft floating around with the extremely small possibility that it might mess up Europa someday, or B) use the remaining fuel to send it into Jupiter where it won't cause any trouble and you might just eek out the last shred of science out of a very successful program. No contest.
Everyone know Pionner 10, well, this "old" thing has been launch in March 2nd, 1972, so it has 28 years old today, happy birthday Pionner 10! -- BeDevId 15453 Download BeOS R5 Lite [be.com] free!
Why can't they just leave it up there orbitting and taking pictures? Is it running out of fuel?
Yes. It's also running out of radiation tolerance, RTG power and a number of other things. Maneuvering fuel is apparently set to run out first, but the vehicle is not going to last much longer regardless. To prevent it from contaminating Europa (and throwing off any search for life we may do there in the future), it has to be prevented from crashing there. One certain method of doing this is to crash it somewhere else. Crude, but highly effective. --
Whether it's running out of fuel is not a question of if, but when. It takes numerous bursts of propellant to keep a craft in any kind of decent orbit when dealing with not just the gravity of Europa, but also Jupiter, Io, Callisto, Ganymede, and the other 10 or more smaller satellites of Jupiter. These tend to pull it in so many different directions that it WILL fall out of orbit if not maintained, (though there is a tiny chance it could actually be propelled away by sheer luck). In addition, this project has been extended beyond its original life, and it costs money to maintain a group to monitor & control the satellite. Once it can no longer take pictures, something must quickly be done to avoid wasting money maintaining what has become a piece of space-junk some 45 light-minutes from Earth.
Microsoft may deliberately crash the $200 Windows 2000 OS which is exploring software stores and computers worldwide at this moment to avoid contaminating system memory. MS Programmers believe simple life forms may exist in your motherboard, as evidenced by the system "bus" which they obviously must use for transportation. An MS spokesman made a statement: "If our OS didn't crash so much, these simple creatures wouldn't be able to survive in your computer. Stable, free OS's run too long, not allowing the bus creatures to come up for air often enough. We're just doing the humane thing."
Does anyone else think that country is worthy of ridicule, that will crash $1.5 billion of equipment to avoid even the remote chance that it might hurt some single-celled bacteria, and then legalize the destruction of millions of unborn babies? Do those mythical one-celled motes from outer space have more rights than human children?
whoa, whoa. calm, cool, collected.
this is space garbage. the mission was judged to be worth whatever they spent on it. then they got three times as much use out of it as was in the original mission guidelines. as much as we litter our own orbits and ecosphere, I hope you haven't gotten the idea that it's a good idea.
they can gain valuable data by doing a suicide mission into Jupiter or Io. don't get the idea that they picked these targets randomly.
*sigh* I really wasn't in the mood for an abortion fight, so I'm just going to say a few things, since it's offtopic:
one prospective member of one (overcrowded) species != wiping out the entire moon's worth of life (and/or) spoiling all future studies and knowledge we might gain from Europa
First of all, Earth bacteria survived [nasa.gov] three years on the Moon. So we know it already happened. Earth bacteria can survive in space.
I don't really want a bacteria which survives that environment back on Earth, but it does not matter much. Earth bacteria get blown off the top of the atmosphere all the time. Gravity pulls some to the Moon or Sun, while the solar wind tends to push them away from the Sun. Some will hit rocks and get carried in random directions, including back to Earth.
It doesn't matter how small the probabilities. Some bacteria has probably already survived a round trip back to us. And if Galileo is ever recovered, it will be in a society with so much space travel taking place that we'll have a lot of life wandering in and out of space.
I doubt they'll crash it when the millenium project is done. Many projects, such as this, get swiped by someone else who needs them. Some researcher, right now, is contacting NASA saying, "Hey, I've got this great project which can use your ship. I know it's only 30% functional, but that is acceptable to me, and the gov't will fund my project if I can bring the cost down. By using your ship instead of sending a new one, I'm shaving 10 years and 100 million off my project."
In fact, many researchers are sending their proposals in all the time for space equiment which is nearing its life cycle. This is how it works in that industry. Who knows, we may even sell it to another country who doesn't have the ability to send stuff into space.
-Adam
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds" - Albert Einstein
Does anyone else think that country is worthy of ridicule, that will crash $1.5 billion of equipment to avoid even the remote chance that it might hurt some single-celled bacteria, and then legalize the destruction of millions of unborn babies? Do those mythical one-celled motes from outer space have more rights than human children?
First off, the $1.5G spacecraft is almost at the end of its life as it is. By crashing it into Jupiter, we can at least collect some last bits of data on the planet..which is what Galileo was intended to do anyways. And it's not like that money is going to waste, it's being circulated through the economy just like any other money.
Secondly, the abortion debate aside, if there is a living ecosystem on Europa (not likely but possible -- and by the way, if you can prove that there's no life on Europa, please do so), it would be incredibly stupid and reckless of us to disrupt it. Even in Christian theology, we are the stewards of creation; this implies that we have a responsibility to protect creation, given to us by God. That aside, there is a wealth of knowledge to be gained from examining Europa directly. If life already exists there, then we have a chance to examine extraterrestrial life...based on an entirely different ecosystem...directly. Otherwise, we have the possibility, for the first time, to introduce terrestrial life to a whole new environment. Both experiments have terribly important implications in biology.
NASA spent that money to design a spacecraft that would spent several years in deep space, resist incredible amounts of radiation (the probe has already managed to go well over twice the amount of radiation it was designed for without serious glitches), computers and software on board the craft to manage all of its systems as well as do diagnostic and preventative capabilities (recongize when an overload of radiation causes the computer to reset itself and automatically correct it), and a vast amount of sensor and communication equipment. Further, it was designed to not explore just *one* world, but Jupiter and many of it's moons - a more complex logistical problem than just dropping an orbiter around, say, Mars.
Given the complexity of the task, NASA built a spacecraft that would be able to do all of the above. They really over-engineered the thing, and then put a *reasonable* cap on the lifespan of the thing (2 years). They were being conservative on the lifespan, and weren't too surprised that it was able to go for another extended mission. That it has lasted this long, though, as they've exposed it to more and more radiation, and has returned the amount and quality of data it has returned, has amazed NASA.
Galileo was one of the last of the big-money space probes, designed to last in inhospital environments and to be quite self-sufficient in case of an emergency. The newer probes, such as the various Mars probes, are much cheaper, but don't have nearly the capabilities as Galileo does - and hence we lose them when a more expensive craft, with redundant systems, diagnostic capabilities, and smarter computers would've survived.
Yes, I think what else could've been done with the money. We could've spent it on the war with drugs, which has turned out to be an exceptional failure that many question was even necessary. We could've spent it on law enforcement - and yet, with places like the LAPD, NYPD, and New Orleans, it doesn't matter how many police we have when the ones we hire are crooked in the first place. We could've built a couple of more fighter planes to add to the military - or maybe we should've just blown that money building a single B-2 bomber.
So maybe you're right - we should've spent that money hiring crooked cops, building implements of destruction, and trying to solve a non-existent drug problem.
I mean, hey, why bother *learning* anything when you can build an aircraft with the radar signature of a bumblebee?
I agree that "ethical" space exploration will require sterilized probes where there might be significant chances for indigenous life...
However, we have already been contaminated by, and have contaminated, most of our inner solar system - through metorites. Simulations show that good sized impacts or volcanic eruptions can fling some material into outer space, and then they cross from planet to planet in mere tens of thousands of years, not millions as previously thought. Turns out that there are dynamically stable / unstable regions which can collect and eject matter - the earth crossing asteroids (Apollos, Amors, Atens, Trojans? I forget which is which) produce signifant meteorites on earth, as do Mars and the moon.
So chances are, we've already "contaminated" other planets, even before our space probes tracked mud in all over the kitchen floor... Europa, because of its ice cover insulating a possible biosphere, is of course unique.
...except that smashing the probe into teensy little pieces doesn't sound very dignified to me.
Now, if they were able to get the probe back to Earth, and put it in a museum, THAT would be dignified.
My personal view is that they've discovered it's on a collision course with Jupiter, there's not enough fuel to change course, and they're trying a different tactic to their usual "it just vanished" routine.
(If their probes "vanished" as often as they've always claimed, the Loch Ness Monster sat next to me at lunch and offered me an autographed photo of the Yeti. If anyone at NASA wants a copy, I'll trade it for a fully-fuelled Saturn V rocket.)
I don't really want a bacteria which survives that environment back on Earth
Well, there are lots of extremophiles here already that survive very "harsh" conditions. Large numbers of microbes are anaerobic, possibly the earliest life here was anaerobic. Geologists and evolutionists get all excited over the presence of oxidized iron because they believe that it's the result of the emergence of microbes that produced the stuff and then other ones emerged that were able to use it. There are bacteria Deinoccus radiodurans that are very happy in strongly radioactive environments, bacteria that eat "poisonous" contaminants. That's all apparently home-grown without any need to postulate microbes hitchhiking in on space debris. That last point is why it's so darn important NOT to contaminate Europa - supposing we find life there after possible contamination. We look at it and it's similar to Earth microbes - cool! That means that there are only a limited number of paths for evolution to take to produce single-celled life, it's independent convergence[*}.....oh, wait no, didn't we just smash a possibly contaminated spaceprobe in here about 20 years ago? {*} Yeah, I know it's damned unlikely to get the same combination of bases/nucleotides at the sequence level necessary for the _true_ definition of convergence, but let's just think even about similar phenotypic morphology - wouldn't it be neat if they had flagella?
NASA always likes crashing things. In fact they are getting real good at it lately.
If they could get the tech and bandwidth going to relay back high-res 5000fps video (so you can later savor every frame in super slo-mo) on the way down they'd have some killer pay-per-view potential there. Great potential revenue stream.
I know I'd pay US$40.00 to watch a piece of space junk slam into a planet. Earth, even
...this rock will die when the moon crashes into the surface anyway.
You mean Earth? Luna is never going to crash into Earth; it is getting farther away every year, as it acquires energy and angular momentum it saps from Earth's rotation via the tides. Long ago there were 400 days per year, compared to 365 now; days are always getting longer, though not fast enough to satisfy most geeks. --
To be, or not to be, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler at this time to suffer the squids and rockets of Europa's oceans, or take arms against this sea of troubles, and by opposing, end it.
If your post was meant to be funny, it didn't contain enough hyperbole to be blatently tongue-in-cheek. So I'll just treat it as ignorance.
You know what Jupiter's made of [nasa.gov], right? 92% hydrogen, 7% helium, mostly methane for the rest, those sorts of things. At the upper atmosphere, it's more than a thousand degrees celcius [nasa.gov], and it's all whipping about rather harshly. And oh yeah, no water. If there is life there, it doesn't resemble anything we have on earth, and whatever we bring from earth wouldn't be able to survive if it got there. And then there's the little problem about how the spacecraft will burn up once it enters the planet's atmosphere, which is after all, all of it (except perhaps for the metalic hydrogen core, which if it exists wouldn't make a lick of difference here). This is in stark contrast to Europa, which doesn't have an appreciable atmosphere and so if we lob something at it, it'll remain intact until it hits the surface.
Soooooo.....What happens if the crash site is currently occupied with Life Forms that we DON'T suspect, hmm? So in an ironic ending to the life of Galileo, it crashes into a planet with life forms and introduces extra-Jupiterian life to divide and conquer.
Yes, it'd be perfeclty ironic, since it'd crap all over lots of our biological and astronomical theories, but that doesn't mean it's possible. You're also forgetting the little bit about how there is no "landing site" per se -- just a spot floating in the outer atmosphere.
Or, we could send it off into deep space, and discover it 300 years from now as a tremendous space probe named G'leo.
Except the whole problem in the first place is that this thing doesn't have any extra fuel lying around for such a purpose. If we could just go ahead and send it off into deep space, it'd still be useful and we'd use it for that. Heck, the Voyager 2 is still sending back data [mit.edu] from outside the solar system, and we're praying it'll last another twenty years and make it to measure the helioshock out there. But escaping the gravity of Jupiter is not a simple thing to do without any propulsion. Have you stopped to wonder why Jupiter has so many moons and trojan asteroids in the first place?
This would make a great sketch if Lovitz were still on the show.
They would have the "Liar Guy" come out in a NASA press conference.
The press would hound him about another NASA loss in the space program.
He would say. "Yeah, we meant to crash into Jupiter. Yeah thats the ticket. We found life on Europa and didn't want the spacecraft to fall on one of the aliens by accident. Yeah. The idea came from my wife.... Natalie Portman... Yeah thats the ticket"
Yes. It's mostly gaseous. (Which if you consider it, would kind of eliminate the idea of 'crashing')
If there is life there, it doesn't resemble anything we have on earth
Of course it doesn't. Which is why the search for life shouldn't be based SOLELY on the search for water. Yeah, it's a great starting point, but there is no guarantee that life everywhere NEEDS water to survive.
whatever we bring from earth wouldn't be able to survive if it got there.
Prove it. Do you know for sure? If you do, what do you base your proof on? How do you know 100% that Earth-based life would not/could not survive on Jupiter?
it'd crap all over lots of our biological and astronomical theories
There are only 2 absolute results to all theories. They're either proven, or broken.
that doesn't mean it's possible.
It doesn't mean it's impossible either.
By the way, that last part was a joke. Haven't you ever seen Star Trek: The motion picture? (God, I HATE explaining jokes.)
Well, I should have made it clear that the whole idea that life exists on some other planet's moon isn't stupid because of anything the Bible says or doesn't say...it's stupid because it's stupid. It's the longest long shot anyone could come up with.
Geez, I KNOW we've "gotten our money's worth" out of this billion-dollar tin can, but given the sheer, incredibly gargantuan odds that anything like a life form exists on Jupiter's moon seems like a big ol' waste to me.
Yes, as long as we have control of Galileo we may as well prevent contamination. But Earth has been leaking stuff for a long time, so the neighborhood is already contaminated. Let's not be messy, but we also won't be surprised if nearby life is related to us.
We already know that Mars had water, so it's already in doubt as to whether Mars or Earth started contaminating the neighborhood first...or maybe we got contaminated from Europa, if it cooled from red-hot iron first.
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Thursday March 02, 2000 @10:30AM (#1230235)
Now, if they were able to get the probe back to Earth, and put it in a museum, THAT would be dignified
If it were only possible, then I'd be totally in favor of returning Galileo to Earth. Unfortunately, it barely has enough fuel to maintain its orbit around Jupter, let alone enough fuel to get all the way back to Earth. Furthermore, any vehicle coming to Earth from Jupiter is gonna be going damn fast when it gets here, and Galileo does not have any method of slowing down (no fuel, no aerobraking).
Galileo may also be somewhat radioactive after 11 years in space and multiple high-radiaion banzai runs past Io. Not the sort of object you'd want to hang up in the Smithsonian.
By the way, we've got a complete Saturn V with zero milage up on blocks by the front gate here. She's a bit run down and the serial numbers don't all match. You'll need to supply your own fuel, too, sorry.
One other option the article mentioned was to point it away from the planets and the moon and send it off.
This would require using a lot of the remaining fuel for the Jupiter-escape maneuver instead of science.
Maybe it is dying anyway, but why kill it off earlier?
It doesn't have the fuel to get to another body of interest, and its sensors aren't useful at long distances (we can see some things very well from here with Hubble). That means that the decision to leave Jupiter orbit would end the science mission just as certainly and irrevocably as a crash, only sooner. --
You'll understand that I feel just because they said Galileo didn't undergo decontamination doesn't mean that other spacecraft have. Certainly Viking had not, if this is only a modern phenomenon.
Personally, I doubt that crashing Galileo into Europa is going to make a hill-of-beans difference to any ecosystem that may exist there. It is extrememly unlikely that any microbes on Galileo survived the trip, especially after the passes over Io.
I guess my point in my previous post is that the statment made by NASA about Europa is mostly usless rubbish/propaganda. It's like saying, "I ain't never been to jail," when all of one's siblings are in jail. What do they want, a cookie? (sorry, blatant Chris Rock rip-off there) So NASA gets to fire a thruster on the side of Galileo for a few seconds and send it hurtling into Jupiter. They talked about that last week describing how they would be able to get good research data from the drop into the atmosphere of Jupiter before Galileo was crushed or burned up. They made no mention of this, "We better miss Europa or we may cause major ecological damage," line.
This remark is little better than posturing on NASA's part. I feel if they were truly concerned about space pollution, they would be doing something about all the crap that is up in Earth orbit. Also, they have probes all over the place now, from Mars Surveyor, to Pioneer, Voyager, blah, blah, blah. NEAR might hit Eros, but they haven't mentioned that there might be life there, as far as NASA knows.
Why aren't they worried about contaminating Jupiter? One very simple reason: It's a giant ball of gas. I don't think you're going to find any water there, and I certainly don't think you're going to find any life. It's essentially a star that almost-was.
"Remember that metrics/english conversion we didn't make, how it made the martian thingy crash?"
"Yeah Frank, I remember that. Why do you ask?"
Well, the jupiter thingy has the same error. I think it's gonna crash too"
"Jehosephat, Bob! Quick! Release a press statement that we're going to do it on purpose in order to... um... um... Save The Environment! yeah, that's the trick"
We did get a lot of usage out of it, but remember, it did cost $1.5B also. An enormous amount of money considering Pathfinder was in the millions. Of course Pathfinder was a completely different mission in itself. I still think it was worth paying that much for Galileo. Of course they didn't use any cost-saving measures though.
..why not a few good orbits around Jupiter to build up momentum?
I lack the time to go into detail about this, and Slashdot isn't the place to try to deliver a tutorial in orbital mechanics anyway (even if I was expert enough to teach such a thing, which I'm not). So the short answers are:
It doesn't work like that.
Momentum is conserved, it has to come from somewhere, and there's no available source other than the on-board rocket motors. "Winding up" won't boost anything any more than Earth will fling itself into interstellar space as a result of 4.3 billion circles around Sol.
The kind of celestial billiard shots which got Galileo to Jupiter in the first place (first Venus, then Earth, then Earth again; the so-called VEEGA [nasa.gov]) require massive bodies to apply the kicks (gravity is the mediating force). This also requires being in roughly the same orbital plane... I think. The moons of Jupiter are too small to apply big enough kicks, and Galileo is in a nearly-polar orbit which cannot take good advantage of them anyway.
So that's my take on the issue.
This sort of project (even if unsuccessful) would teach NASA how to use unfueled satellites efficiently.
NASA/JPL has been doing this since before you were born. Just getting Galileo to Jupiter without the Centaur booster originally specified for the purpose (NASA refused to allow hydrogen-fuelled rockets in the Shuttle cargo bay after Challenger) required wizardry and finesse beyond your dreams. See this link [nasa.gov] for more information on the VEEGA maneuver, and this [nasa.gov] for data on the Venus-Venus-Earth-Jupiter slingshot used to get Cassini to Saturn. --
I fear you are correct. The sanity-blasting truth of these multi-tendriled fascist space monsters is known to me all too dearly. At certain ghoulish times of the year, my sleep is haunted by the dreams of slime covered, cyclopean columns which mark out a dead alien city. Shadowy figures shuffle along its centuried streets. How many aeons have past since those enormous walls were formed I dare not ponder. Even in the bright light of day, I fear I hear the horrible clicking of their hellish maws at the very limit of perception.
A first stike? I think the war is lost before the first volley of arms. I will no more be reading Slashdot because I now do what must be done. I go to the sea the follow the ancient call of our nightmare God.
The point of the crashing maneuver is to prevent Galileo from crashing into Europa and possibly contaminating it with Earth organisms, thereby making it difficult or impossible to determine if life arose there naturally. Galileo's mission is almost done, but the value of future missions is at stake here. We sterilized the Viking probes to avoid just this scenario. --
I suppose given their current track record with crash landing expensive satelites and recon vehicales, they figure this is one operation they cannot screw up.
I just hope they dont miss and send it flying off into deep space.
Galileo has given us invaluable data about our solar system: it's formation, history, what planets are made of and what they look like up close. Pretty much everything we know about our solar system outside of Earth can be attributed to this little space craft. It's well worth $1.5 billion for this knowledge.
I thought that the Voyager probes I and II did more than Galileo did. Do you have some references?
The original Voyager probe is actually still transmitting data to stations back on earth and giving some interesting data about solar wind dynamics and the structure of deep space.
Ahh, but by choosing to remain in America, he also chooses to participate in a democratic republic which requires a certain amount of people to do some bitching. So to him I say, bitch on!
Esperandi P.S. Yes, your tax money is stolen from you, there is no other word for it. Even if you WANT to pay, it is taken involuntarily with the threat of removing your freedom behind it. This is required to maintain a democratic republic, you change it so that if you don't pay the taxes, you get absolutely no benefit from anyone elses payment either.
Smashing it into pieces right where we can see it sounds just fine.
If we just let it zoom off into space it'll only get damaged by a meteor collision, get sucked through a black hole, drift aimlessly for two hundred years, get picked up and repaired by an race of alien robots and then return to destroy the Earth. And you know it.
PS. I know we have two Voyager craft that run a similar same risk. But one of those is bound to go through a wormhole and get lost in the Delta Quadrant. Or something.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Is this a plausible scenario (polluting Europa I mean) considering all the radiation the probe has endured? Shouldn't all organic organisms be completely destroyed?
Esperandi Are viruses immune to radiation? Considering we've never been able to cure a single one (go ahead, do the research, we can't kill the buggers) I'm guessing that they are...
Well, they hate hip-hop so they can't be hardly that bad... but then again, their choice is mariachi music which is almost as bad... damn, between a rock and a hard place.
Tell me where they stand on technology issues, maybe then you can get me to hate them;)
Esperandi They can eat my dog, they can take my neighbors SUV, they can even take my hemoglobin, as long as they promise to beat the hell out of the AT&T execs until I get a motherfucking cable modem!
You're not being forced to do anything. You voluntarily signed yourself into the social contract of the world. By entering into this contract, you get the benefits, but you also are expected to hold up your end of the bargain. If you DON'T want to pay for medical research, you can always wander off to Antarctica, found your own little country, and cut off all links to the outside world.
Look at it this way... Let's say we let Galileo crash into Europa. (Isn't that extraordinarily unlikely, anyway?) Thirty years later, we land a probe on Europa, and it discovers a colony of organisms near the Galileo crash site. What's the most plausible explanation?
The first scientists to announce the discovery of living extraterrestrial organisms are going to want to be damn sure they've covered all the other possibilities first. We may as well prevent Galileo from becoming an issue in the first place.
You're silly. They want to avoid contaminating Europa so that if they DO find lifeforms, they can say that they didn't get there when Galileo crashed into Europa.
Given the current financial situation of NASA, wouldn't it be best to return the probe to Earth, auction it off at eBay and use the money to fund the next mission?
"All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Use then together, Use them in peace." I think someone or something has the fear of God in them over at NASA to maybe not spoil another pristine worl with our junk. Beside the mission has bee a success for over a decade. Wasted tax dollars? I think not!
permenant orbit? (Score:1)
NASA And the PR Fiasco. (Score:4)
I just hope they dont miss and send it flying off into deep space.
In other news... (Score:1)
Why? (Score:1)
No! Crash it into Europa! (Score:3)
Before everyone goes off on wasting the money (Score:5)
Sgt Pepper
Lame Sig Shamelessly Ripped from
Fortune:
You think Oedipus had a problem -- Adam was Eve's mother.
start life (Score:2)
A piece of history (Score:2)
And let's not forget exactly where all that money it cost goes to: paying people's paychecks. The dollars aren't used as rocket fuel, y'know.
Let there be Life (Score:1)
Too timid (Score:1)
On the contrary, I'd see how low I could get Galileo to orbit Europa. Then I'd try to edge lower and lower until it crashed.
Faith in NASA... (Score:3)
Crash Galileo into Europa as Pre-Emptive Strike (Score:5)
At night I can hear the transmissions from their communications satellites resonating in my fillings; the hideous, scheming clacking of their beaks has rendered sleep an unattainable fantasy. They intend to devour our dogs whole and use our sports-utility vehicles as punch-bowls for their post-conquest banquet. They monitor our radio transmissions, love our mariachi music, and yet despise our hip-hop. These are truly monsters.
How long will the scientific community continue to feign ignorance of this exo-cephalopodic threat looming under Europa?s dark plutonian shores? And how long will it be until our own squid-- trusted friend and snack-- turn on us? As the first earth-dweller to fully recognize the very real threat of worldwide Europan conquest, I enjoin you: We must take up arms against this sea of troubles, and by opposing, end it.
Who's with me?
Missed Chance (Score:1)
Martian Chronicles for Galileo??? (Score:1)
If scientists can successfully bring it back through the asteroid belt and in tact to complete at least on of those failed missions, then it shows the versatility of the "new NASA". Galileo has already proven its ability in completing various missions, why not one more before it gets destroyed.
Personally, if saving Galileo is a priority and bringing it back would work, I believe that NASA could save face and return hope to the Mars priority it's been running with these past few years. Plus I'd like to be around when "The Martian Chronicles" begins to actually come to pass.
I guess you might say that's my two cents.
This Headline implies that NASA it wasting.... (Score:5)
Remember that Galileo has done it's purpose and to avoid a possible extraterrestrial contamination of another celestial body that possibly may supporting life, they decided to crash it into another planet that (most likely) does not support any life.
NASA isn't in the habit of building something just to throw it away for no good reason. Sure, they make mistakes, but NASA is still ran by humans, and humans make 'human errors.' The technological feats that they have done (and are still doing) boggles the mind. (I'd like to see you calculate the exact vector to break orbit and travel to Jupiter over the course of 2 years with only 2 minutes of burn-time)
NASA is still going strong and I feel quite happy that my tax-dollars are being pourned into it. (Besides they brought us TANG!
Cheers.
--
Visions of 2010... (Score:1)
Only we're there 10 years early!
Eric
so? (Score:1)
and they evaluating scenarios to ensure europa won't be contamined.. one of them being to deliberatly crash an old spacecraft..
don't start nagging again that the US government is wasting money..
it would be a much greater loss to lose/blur evidence about alien lifeforms on europa.
Science over Politics (Score:1)
And to those who complain of waste, Galileo is over 10 years old. It has already accomplished its original mission as well as a two year extension. I think this noble-minded idea is a fit end to its career.
A.C.Clarke (Score:1)
redirect it (Score:2)
Space junk (Score:4)
Nice to see that NASA has finally woken up to the problem of space rubbish around other planets. If Gallileo does have Earth-born bacteria on it which have survived in space (there are various theories about life spreading from planet to planet by this method) it would be extremely frustrating to disrupt any current ecosystem on Europa. On the other hand, this concern will make the job of examining Europa in the future more tricky, regardless of what they do with Galileo (dropping it into the Jovian atmosphere or crashing it into Io both sound like possibilities to gain interesting data on either planet/moon). If we are going to go explore Europa for signs of life, we are almost certainly going to have to do it remotely with 'sterilized' equipment - sending a few astronauts down to have look isn't going to help in the attempts to not disrupt any life already there.
Of course, our own orbit is now strewn with bits of satellites and rocket boosters - thankfully it all tends to wander around at the same speeds as the spacecraft in orbit, but it gets a little bit unnerving to wonder about the future of colonizing the galaxy when you have to dodge the last 100 years of waste products in getting started.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Cosmic Radiation Sterilisation (Score:1)
Even if microbes did make it through space and survice an impact what is the chances that any alien life would be compatible with ours?
I am! (Score:1)
Of COURSE we're crashing the probe ... (Score:1)
"ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE."
Re:*Sigh* (Score:2)
Why not? (Score:1)
Seriously, though, what would happen if we get there and all we find is a single alien village with a lot of corpses and a wrecked satellite?
Oops!
Do they really have a choice? I know a lot of us are pissed off that three cents of our tax money is going toward possibly saving a lifeform other than humans, but isn't that -- objectively speaking -- the wisest decision?
You will probably find as much money between the cushions on your sofa as you have invested into this project. Chill out, people.
ICQ: 49636524
snowphoton@mindspring.com
Sounds like a good idea (Score:4)
Seriously, this makes sense. Once they've squeezed the last bit of use out of it, why not?
Nice to see someone thinking a little ahead for once.
(ObRef: "All these worlds are yours-- except Europa. Attempt no landings there.")
Nothing being wasted, mission objective finished (Score:1)
We have made contact! (Score:3)
Subordinate: Sir, I'm starting to get an image.
Superior: See if you can focus it. We want to know if there's any real life on Europa. We don't want to contaminate it.
Subordinate: Sir, I'm seeing something. It looks like... Like a...
Superior: Yes?
Subordinate: My God... We won't have to worry about contaminating Europa, sir.
Superior: Dammit, what is it?!?
Subordinate: It's a Starbucks, sir.
--
"This is a revolution, dammit! We're going to have to offend SOMEBODY!" - John Adams
Michael Chisari
How we screwed that up (Score:1)
Actually, NASA forgot that a multi-ton satellite re-entering earth's atmosphere in the southern hemisphere spins COUNTERclockwise.
I have the answer (Score:1)
Bang per buck? (Score:1)
As for the cost, yes, $1.5 billion is a lot of money. But divided equally amoung the population of the USA, it comes out to about $5 per person (figuring 300 million people). This project has already done quite a bit. I think it has been worth my $5.
Re:Trollin' for Galileo (Score:1)
As a long-time faithful reader of Slash-Dot, I have been increasingly disturbed as of late by the 'Slash-Dot Effect' that seems to have afflicted Slash-Dot its very self!
Please, for the sake of your numerous readers, replace your "Lin-ux" servers and "perl" with Windows 2000 and ASP so that we will no longer need to deal with un-bearable load times.
Thank you.
Nathaniel P. Sloane.
has the environmental movement gone too far? (Score:1)
Now the real question in my mind, when the slam Galileo into Jupiter, will I be able to get it on Pay Per View?
- RLJ
Fear of Lawyers (Score:1)
NASA is afraid of the class action suit that some spaceprobe-chasing lawyers would start on behalf of all the non-terrestrial life-forms that the crash had affected.
Is it true NASA stands for Not Another Space Accident?
HAL and Bowman's message (Score:1)
Evolution = Crash (Score:1)
After all, with the NASA budget shrinking every year, this rock will die when the moon crashes into the surface anyway.
Foresight? (Score:1)
REAL foresight would have been sending the probe out clean to begin with so that contamination would never be an issue. You may argue that they had no idea Galileo would make it this far. I have two responses to that:
1) "We'll never need more than 640KB of RAM"
2) Even if you never made it to Europa, why risk contaminating space itself? There are a lot of people studying space-borne life and having microbe-infested spaceships zooming around probably doesn't help much.
--
Here is the result of your Slashdot Purity Test.
monkeys (Score:1)
I'm wondering if we can turn this into a big experiment... try to closely recreate the conditions on Earth that led to the evolution of intelligent life. Gently tip the scales of evolution so that, in a few hundred million years (after we have long been extinct), a new race of intelligent creatures will rise up and discover the remains of our civilization. Our people would be sort of cosmic parents. Or not.
Funnier posts (Score:1)
Re:This Headline implies that NASA it wasting.... (Score:1)
growing up.. what DID V.I.N.C.E.N.T stand for again.. i remember reading a kids book based on
the flim and it said what it was..
:)
What about the Prime Directive? (Score:1)
(You mean Star Trek isn't real?)
Bad Mojo
Incoming message... (Score:2)
thank you.
Thought for the day (Score:1)
All these worlds are yours... Except Europa.
Attempt no landing there. Use them together.
Use them in peace.
Re:Cosmic Radiation Sterilisation (Score:3)
We don't know. That's the point.
Even if microbes did make it through space and survice an impact what is the chances that any alien life would be compatible with ours?
We don't know. That's the point. There is no basis (yet) on which to judge those odds. Anyone who says otherwise is indulging in a WAG whether they admit it or not.
Why take any chance? Though it's functioned way beyond it's expected time, the craft is nearing the end of its usefulness. It's time to clean up after ourselves. For a change.
Oh come on we all know what happened (Score:3)
Nasa Scientist A: I'm getting bored at looking at Jupiter
Nasa Scientist B: I know what you mean, same old same odl
A: Mind you those comets that smashed into it were pretty cool
B: Yeah, 11 years watching and its all clouds and methane, where is the fun in that ?
A: We need to do something exciting.
Enter Military Man C
C: Hi Guys, anything new ?
A: Nope, just a big red dot and a possible ocean.
B: And of course the black bits.
C: Okay I'll be off.
A: Hang On, we're just wondering how to make this job more interesting, any ideas ?
C: Well you could take the military approach...
B: Which is ?
C: If it costs over a billion dollars, make sure it crashes, we did it with the Stealth Fighters and Bombers, its the whole purpose of the ICBMs. And they make WAY cool noises and pretty lights when they go up.
A: You mean you crash these things on purpose ?
C: Sure sometimes, but we video everything just incase we get lucky by accident.
And that ladies and gentlemen was how the plan was formed.
I know, I was coffee mug D.
Re:Hear me out on this (Score:1)
I couldn't agree more. Criminalize masturbation NOW! [mwscomp.com]
This is incredibly stupid.
At least you got one thing right.
Cheers,
-j.
As Jack Handley said (Score:2)
If I had a space ship, I don't think I'll just crash it into Jupiter. There's got to be a better way.
Re:Hear me out on this (Score:2)
Well, first of all with the cost argument, the space craft is 11 years old, was only intended to be used for 2 years, so in essence, you got 9 years free, can't beat that deal...
I know you're going after the abortion deal, which is really disturbing, whether or not you believe abortion should be legal (I really don't, with some exceptions) you must keep in mind, these are OUR offspring, any life on another planet is NOT ours, and therefore we have more right to destroy our stuff then their stuff. I know it sounds draconian but really thats the way it is.
There are no life forms on any of those moons. This is incredibly stupid.
So I take it you've been there, right?
-- iCEBaLM
Okay, so what if...... (Score:2)
Great. So those microbes take a plunge on to a new planet. Fast forward 5 billion years, and those microbes have populated Jupiter and have created life on an otherwise lifeless planet. We've just infected Jupiter!
"Just to be sure, they want to get rid of it and make sure it doesn't go into Europa, where we have a possible habitat of some kind of extraterrestrial life."
Soooooo.....What happens if the crash site is currently occupied with Life Forms that we DON'T suspect, hmm? So in an ironic ending to the life of Galileo, it crashes into a planet with life forms and introduces extra-Jupiterian life to divide and conquer.
Or, we could send it off into deep space, and discover it 300 years from now as a tremendous space probe named G'leo.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
Dignity and honor? (Score:5)
Re:permenant orbit? (Score:2)
Makes sense to me. It's already performed it's original mission and then some so it's not like wasting billions of dollars when this craft is 11 years old and has reached the end of it's useful life anyway. Rather than letting this thing float around as so much space junk, they are thinking about of 'disposing' of it as best they can at this point. Plunge it into Jupiter, take a few snapshots on the way in for the evening news. So what's the diff? Option A) have a dead spacecraft floating around with the extremely small possibility that it might mess up Europa someday, or B) use the remaining fuel to send it into Jupiter where it won't cause any trouble and you might just eek out the last shred of science out of a very successful program. No contest.
Pionner 10 turns 28 ! (Score:2)
--
BeDevId 15453
Download BeOS R5 Lite [be.com] free!
Re:permenant orbit? (Score:5)
--
Re:This Headline implies that NASA it wasting.... (Score:2)
Vital Information Necessary, CENTralised. Twenty years later, and I still remember one of the worst acronyms ever.
Re:permenant orbit? (Score:2)
Whether it's running out of fuel is not a question of if, but when. It takes numerous bursts of propellant to keep a craft in any kind of decent orbit when dealing with not just the gravity of Europa, but also Jupiter, Io, Callisto, Ganymede, and the other 10 or more smaller satellites of Jupiter. These tend to pull it in so many different directions that it WILL fall out of orbit if not maintained, (though there is a tiny chance it could actually be propelled away by sheer luck). In addition, this project has been extended beyond its original life, and it costs money to maintain a group to monitor & control the satellite. Once it can no longer take pictures, something must quickly be done to avoid wasting money maintaining what has become a piece of space-junk some 45 light-minutes from Earth.
Microsoft may Deliberately Crash Windows (Score:3)
Re:Hear me out on this (Score:5)
Does anyone else think that country is worthy of ridicule, that will crash $1.5 billion of equipment to avoid even the remote chance that it might hurt some single-celled bacteria, and then legalize the destruction of millions of unborn babies? Do those mythical one-celled motes from outer space have more rights than human children?
whoa, whoa. calm, cool, collected.
I'd recognize that hyphenation style anywhere! (Score:3)
T. Herman Zweibel has started reading /. !!!
History Repeating (Score:2)
I don't really want a bacteria which survives that environment back on Earth, but it does not matter much. Earth bacteria get blown off the top of the atmosphere all the time. Gravity pulls some to the Moon or Sun, while the solar wind tends to push them away from the Sun. Some will hit rocks and get carried in random directions, including back to Earth.
It doesn't matter how small the probabilities. Some bacteria has probably already survived a round trip back to us. And if Galileo is ever recovered, it will be in a society with so much space travel taking place that we'll have a lot of life wandering in and out of space.
It won't crash, someone else will pick it up... (Score:2)
In fact, many researchers are sending their proposals in all the time for space equiment which is nearing its life cycle. This is how it works in that industry. Who knows, we may even sell it to another country who doesn't have the ability to send stuff into space.
-Adam
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds" - Albert Einstein
Re:This Headline implies that NASA it wasting.... (Score:2)
Would you like that answer in metric, english, or an odd mixture of the two? :)
Re:Hear me out on this (Score:2)
First off, the $1.5G spacecraft is almost at the end of its life as it is. By crashing it into Jupiter, we can at least collect some last bits of data on the planet..which is what Galileo was intended to do anyways. And it's not like that money is going to waste, it's being circulated through the economy just like any other money.
Secondly, the abortion debate aside, if there is a living ecosystem on Europa (not likely but possible -- and by the way, if you can prove that there's no life on Europa, please do so), it would be incredibly stupid and reckless of us to disrupt it. Even in Christian theology, we are the stewards of creation; this implies that we have a responsibility to protect creation, given to us by God. That aside, there is a wealth of knowledge to be gained from examining Europa directly. If life already exists there, then we have a chance to examine extraterrestrial life...based on an entirely different ecosystem...directly. Otherwise, we have the possibility, for the first time, to introduce terrestrial life to a whole new environment. Both experiments have terribly important implications in biology.
Re:Before everyone goes off on wasting the money (Score:5)
NASA spent that money to design a spacecraft that would spent several years in deep space, resist incredible amounts of radiation (the probe has already managed to go well over twice the amount of radiation it was designed for without serious glitches), computers and software on board the craft to manage all of its systems as well as do diagnostic and preventative capabilities (recongize when an overload of radiation causes the computer to reset itself and automatically correct it), and a vast amount of sensor and communication equipment. Further, it was designed to not explore just *one* world, but Jupiter and many of it's moons - a more complex logistical problem than just dropping an orbiter around, say, Mars.
Given the complexity of the task, NASA built a spacecraft that would be able to do all of the above. They really over-engineered the thing, and then put a *reasonable* cap on the lifespan of the thing (2 years). They were being conservative on the lifespan, and weren't too surprised that it was able to go for another extended mission. That it has lasted this long, though, as they've exposed it to more and more radiation, and has returned the amount and quality of data it has returned, has amazed NASA.
Galileo was one of the last of the big-money space probes, designed to last in inhospital environments and to be quite self-sufficient in case of an emergency. The newer probes, such as the various Mars probes, are much cheaper, but don't have nearly the capabilities as Galileo does - and hence we lose them when a more expensive craft, with redundant systems, diagnostic capabilities, and smarter computers would've survived.
Yes, I think what else could've been done with the money. We could've spent it on the war with drugs, which has turned out to be an exceptional failure that many question was even necessary. We could've spent it on law enforcement - and yet, with places like the LAPD, NYPD, and New Orleans, it doesn't matter how many police we have when the ones we hire are crooked in the first place. We could've built a couple of more fighter planes to add to the military - or maybe we should've just blown that money building a single B-2 bomber.
So maybe you're right - we should've spent that money hiring crooked cops, building implements of destruction, and trying to solve a non-existent drug problem.
I mean, hey, why bother *learning* anything when you can build an aircraft with the radar signature of a bumblebee?
Re:Space junk: we already have alien contamination (Score:2)
However, we have already been contaminated by, and have contaminated, most of our inner solar system - through metorites. Simulations show that good sized impacts or volcanic eruptions can fling some material into outer space, and then they cross from planet to planet in mere tens of thousands of years, not millions as previously thought. Turns out that there are dynamically stable / unstable regions which can collect and eject matter - the earth crossing asteroids (Apollos, Amors, Atens, Trojans? I forget which is which) produce signifant meteorites on earth, as do Mars and the moon.
So chances are, we've already "contaminated" other planets, even before our space probes tracked mud in all over the kitchen floor... Europa, because of its ice cover insulating a possible biosphere, is of course unique.
You're absolutely right... (Score:2)
Now, if they were able to get the probe back to Earth, and put it in a museum, THAT would be dignified.
My personal view is that they've discovered it's on a collision course with Jupiter, there's not enough fuel to change course, and they're trying a different tactic to their usual "it just vanished" routine.
(If their probes "vanished" as often as they've always claimed, the Loch Ness Monster sat next to me at lunch and offered me an autographed photo of the Yeti. If anyone at NASA wants a copy, I'll trade it for a fully-fuelled Saturn V rocket.)
Re:History Repeating (Score:4)
Well, there are lots of extremophiles here already that survive very "harsh" conditions. Large numbers of microbes are anaerobic, possibly the earliest life here was anaerobic. Geologists and evolutionists get all excited over the presence of oxidized iron because they believe that it's the result of the emergence of microbes that produced the stuff and then other ones emerged that were able to use it. There are bacteria Deinoccus radiodurans that are very happy in strongly radioactive environments, bacteria that eat "poisonous" contaminants. That's all apparently home-grown without any need to postulate microbes hitchhiking in on space debris.
That last point is why it's so darn important NOT to contaminate Europa - supposing we find life there after possible contamination. We look at it and it's similar to Earth microbes - cool! That means that there are only a limited number of paths for evolution to take to produce single-celled life, it's independent convergence[*}.....oh, wait no, didn't we just smash a possibly contaminated spaceprobe in here about 20 years ago? {*} Yeah, I know it's damned unlikely to get the same combination of bases/nucleotides at the sequence level necessary for the _true_ definition of convergence, but let's just think even about similar phenotypic morphology - wouldn't it be neat if they had flagella?
Re:Crash it into what? (Score:3)
If they could get the tech and bandwidth going to relay back high-res 5000fps video (so you can later savor every frame in super slo-mo) on the way down they'd have some killer pay-per-view potential there. Great potential revenue stream.
I know I'd pay US$40.00 to watch a piece of space junk slam into a planet. Earth, even
Re:Evolution = Crash (Score:2)
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Re:Crash Galileo into Europa as Pre-Emptive Strike (Score:2)
Re:Okay, so what if...... (Score:5)
You know what Jupiter's made of [nasa.gov], right? 92% hydrogen, 7% helium, mostly methane for the rest, those sorts of things. At the upper atmosphere, it's more than a thousand degrees celcius [nasa.gov], and it's all whipping about rather harshly. And oh yeah, no water. If there is life there, it doesn't resemble anything we have on earth, and whatever we bring from earth wouldn't be able to survive if it got there. And then there's the little problem about how the spacecraft will burn up once it enters the planet's atmosphere, which is after all, all of it (except perhaps for the metalic hydrogen core, which if it exists wouldn't make a lick of difference here). This is in stark contrast to Europa, which doesn't have an appreciable atmosphere and so if we lob something at it, it'll remain intact until it hits the surface.
Soooooo.....What happens if the crash site is currently occupied with Life Forms that we DON'T suspect, hmm? So in an ironic ending to the life of Galileo, it crashes into a planet with life forms and introduces extra-Jupiterian life to divide and conquer.
Yes, it'd be perfeclty ironic, since it'd crap all over lots of our biological and astronomical theories, but that doesn't mean it's possible. You're also forgetting the little bit about how there is no "landing site" per se -- just a spot floating in the outer atmosphere.
Or, we could send it off into deep space, and discover it 300 years from now as a tremendous space probe named G'leo.
Except the whole problem in the first place is that this thing doesn't have any extra fuel lying around for such a purpose. If we could just go ahead and send it off into deep space, it'd still be useful and we'd use it for that. Heck, the Voyager 2 is still sending back data [mit.edu] from outside the solar system, and we're praying it'll last another twenty years and make it to measure the helioshock out there. But escaping the gravity of Jupiter is not a simple thing to do without any propulsion. Have you stopped to wonder why Jupiter has so many moons and trojan asteroids in the first place?
I could see Jon Lovitz on Saturday Night Live Now. (Score:2)
They would have the "Liar Guy" come out in a NASA press conference.
The press would hound him about another NASA loss in the space program.
He would say. "Yeah, we meant to crash into Jupiter. Yeah thats the ticket. We found life on Europa and didn't want the spacecraft to fall on one of the aliens by accident. Yeah. The idea came from my wife.... Natalie Portman... Yeah thats the ticket"
Re:Okay, so what if...... (Score:2)
Yes. It's mostly gaseous. (Which if you consider it, would kind of eliminate the idea of 'crashing')
If there is life there, it doesn't resemble anything we have on earth
Of course it doesn't. Which is why the search for life shouldn't be based SOLELY on the search for water. Yeah, it's a great starting point, but there is no guarantee that life everywhere NEEDS water to survive.
whatever we bring from earth wouldn't be able to survive if it got there.
Prove it. Do you know for sure? If you do, what do you base your proof on? How do you know 100% that Earth-based life would not/could not survive on Jupiter?
it'd crap all over lots of our biological and astronomical theories
There are only 2 absolute results to all theories. They're either proven, or broken.
that doesn't mean it's possible.
It doesn't mean it's impossible either.
By the way, that last part was a joke. Haven't you ever seen Star Trek: The motion picture? (God, I HATE explaining jokes.)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
Re:Hear me out on this (Score:2)
Geez, I KNOW we've "gotten our money's worth" out of this billion-dollar tin can, but given the sheer, incredibly gargantuan odds that anything like a life form exists on Jupiter's moon seems like a big ol' waste to me.
My choice for crash sites.... (Score:2)
Online gaming for motivated, sportsmanlike players: www.steelmaelstrom.org [www.steelm...gtargettop].
Re:History Repeating (Score:2)
We already know that Mars had water, so it's already in doubt as to whether Mars or Earth started contaminating the neighborhood first...or maybe we got contaminated from Europa, if it cooled from red-hot iron first.
Put Galileo in a Museum? (Score:4)
If it were only possible, then I'd be totally in favor of returning Galileo to Earth. Unfortunately, it barely has enough fuel to maintain its orbit around Jupter, let alone enough fuel to get all the way back to Earth. Furthermore, any vehicle coming to Earth from Jupiter is gonna be going damn fast when it gets here, and Galileo does not have any method of slowing down (no fuel, no aerobraking).
Galileo may also be somewhat radioactive after 11 years in space and multiple high-radiaion banzai runs past Io. Not the sort of object you'd want to hang up in the Smithsonian.
By the way, we've got a complete Saturn V with zero milage up on blocks by the front gate here. She's a bit run down and the serial numbers don't all match. You'll need to supply your own fuel, too, sorry.
-- a real Person From NASA(tm)
Fuel almost certainly doesn't permit that. (Score:2)
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Re:Don't contaminate Europa...Mars? (Score:2)
Personally, I doubt that crashing Galileo into Europa is going to make a hill-of-beans difference to any ecosystem that may exist there. It is extrememly unlikely that any microbes on Galileo survived the trip, especially after the passes over Io.
I guess my point in my previous post is that the statment made by NASA about Europa is mostly usless rubbish/propaganda. It's like saying, "I ain't never been to jail," when all of one's siblings are in jail. What do they want, a cookie? (sorry, blatant Chris Rock rip-off there) So NASA gets to fire a thruster on the side of Galileo for a few seconds and send it hurtling into Jupiter. They talked about that last week describing how they would be able to get good research data from the drop into the atmosphere of Jupiter before Galileo was crushed or burned up. They made no mention of this, "We better miss Europa or we may cause major ecological damage," line.
This remark is little better than posturing on NASA's part. I feel if they were truly concerned about space pollution, they would be doing something about all the crap that is up in Earth orbit. Also, they have probes all over the place now, from Mars Surveyor, to Pioneer, Voyager, blah, blah, blah. NEAR might hit Eros, but they haven't mentioned that there might be life there, as far as NASA knows.
What about contaminating Jupiter? (Score:2)
Let's imagine the conversation at NASA: (Score:3)
"hey Bob?"
"Yeah Frank"
"Remember that metrics/english conversion we didn't make, how it made the martian thingy crash?"
"Yeah Frank, I remember that. Why do you ask?"
Well, the jupiter thingy has the same error. I think it's gonna crash too"
"Jehosephat, Bob! Quick! Release a press statement that we're going to do it on purpose in order to... um... um... Save The Environment! yeah, that's the trick"
"I wish I were smart like you, Frank."
Re:Before everyone goes off on wasting the money (Score:2)
Of course Pathfinder was a completely different mission in itself. I still think it was worth paying that much for Galileo. Of course they didn't use any cost-saving measures though.
Re:Running on fumes?? Was Martian Chronicles (Score:4)
- It doesn't work like that.
- Momentum is conserved, it has to come from somewhere, and there's no available source other than the on-board rocket motors. "Winding up" won't boost anything any more than Earth will fling itself into interstellar space as a result of 4.3 billion circles around Sol.
- The kind of celestial billiard shots which got Galileo to Jupiter in the first place (first Venus, then Earth, then Earth again; the so-called VEEGA [nasa.gov]) require massive bodies to apply the kicks (gravity is the mediating force). This also requires being in roughly the same orbital plane... I think. The moons of Jupiter are too small to apply big enough kicks, and Galileo is in a nearly-polar orbit which cannot take good advantage of them anyway.
So that's my take on the issue. NASA/JPL has been doing this since before you were born. Just getting Galileo to Jupiter without the Centaur booster originally specified for the purpose (NASA refused to allow hydrogen-fuelled rockets in the Shuttle cargo bay after Challenger) required wizardry and finesse beyond your dreams. See this link [nasa.gov] for more information on the VEEGA maneuver, and this [nasa.gov] for data on the Venus-Venus-Earth-Jupiter slingshot used to get Cassini to Saturn.--
Re: The dreaded nightmare God (Score:2)
I fear you are correct. The sanity-blasting truth of these multi-tendriled fascist space monsters is known to me all too dearly. At certain ghoulish times of the year, my sleep is haunted by the dreams of slime covered, cyclopean columns which mark out a dead alien city. Shadowy figures shuffle along its centuried streets. How many aeons have past since those enormous walls were formed I dare not ponder. Even in the bright light of day, I fear I hear the horrible clicking of their hellish maws at the very limit of perception.
A first stike? I think the war is lost before the first volley of arms. I will no more be reading Slashdot because I now do what must be done. I go to the sea the follow the ancient call of our nightmare God.
AI! Cthulhu F'htagn!!
$1.5b? (Score:2)
-AS
Money's hardly a factor; don't trash the subject! (Score:4)
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Re:NASA And the PR Fiasco. (Score:2)
I suppose given their current track record with crash landing expensive satelites and recon vehicales, they figure this is one operation they cannot screw up.
I just hope they dont miss and send it flying off into deep space.
Murphy will intervene...
Re:Before everyone goes off on wasting the money (Score:2)
to this little space craft. It's well worth $1.5 billion for this knowledge.
I thought that the Voyager probes I and II did more than Galileo did. Do you have some references?
The original Voyager probe is actually still transmitting data to stations back on earth and giving some interesting data about solar wind dynamics and the structure of deep space.
Re:Before everyone goes off on wasting the money (Score:3)
Esperandi
P.S. Yes, your tax money is stolen from you, there is no other word for it. Even if you WANT to pay, it is taken involuntarily with the threat of removing your freedom behind it. This is required to maintain a democratic republic, you change it so that if you don't pay the taxes, you get absolutely no benefit from anyone elses payment either.
Re:You're absolutely right... (Score:3)
If we just let it zoom off into space it'll only get damaged by a meteor collision, get sucked through a black hole, drift aimlessly for two hundred years, get picked up and repaired by an race of alien robots and then return to destroy the Earth. And you know it.
PS. I know we have two Voyager craft that run a similar same risk. But one of those is bound to go through a wormhole and get lost in the Delta Quadrant. Or something.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:Money's hardly a factor; don't trash the subjec (Score:2)
Esperandi
Are viruses immune to radiation? Considering we've never been able to cure a single one (go ahead, do the research, we can't kill the buggers) I'm guessing that they are...
They can't be all bad.. then again... (Score:2)
Tell me where they stand on technology issues, maybe then you can get me to hate them
Esperandi
They can eat my dog, they can take my neighbors SUV, they can even take my hemoglobin, as long as they promise to beat the hell out of the AT&T execs until I get a motherfucking cable modem!
Re:has the environmental movement gone too far? (Score:2)
Unfortunatly it isn't the ton of metal and silicon they are worried about. It's the micro gram of flesh along for the ride.
You signed the social contract (Score:2)
You voluntarily signed yourself into the social contract of the world.
By entering into this contract, you get the benefits, but you also are expected to hold up your end of the bargain.
If you DON'T want to pay for medical research, you can always wander off to Antarctica, found your own little country, and cut off all links to the outside world.
Re:Money's hardly a factor; don't trash the subjec (Score:2)
The first scientists to announce the discovery of living extraterrestrial organisms are going to want to be damn sure they've covered all the other possibilities first. We may as well prevent Galileo from becoming an issue in the first place.
Re:This Headline implies that NASA it wasting.... (Score:2)
Posting before thinking again, are we?
--
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Re:Put Galileo in a Museum? (Score:2)
2010-Odessey 2 (Score:2)
Re:*Sigh* (Score:2)
Later
Erik Z
Re:Hear me out on this (Score:2)
-- iCEBaLM