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Space Blimps 77

Posted by michael from the proudly-sponsored-by-Budweiser dept.
EccentricAnomaly writes: "JPL has a press release about an aerorover blimp for exploring Saturn's moon Titan. There's also a group that has been working on inflatable rovers for Mars and Titan. And there's a group working on flying robots, or aerobots for space exploration. With a 2.5 to 3 hour round-trip light time between Earth and Saturn, flying anything on Titan has got to be a little dicey."
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Space Blimps

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  • I find it difficult to believe that Titan would be that drastically affected by Jupiter's magnetic field, being that Titan is a moon of Saturn and all...

  • Do you have any URLs to support this? I find it hard to believe that a few million gallons of fuel is more expensive than the resources needed to keep humans alive indefinitely in a sealed environment and send them supplies from Earth as you propose.

    Perhaps wwe could plan some sort of self-returning mission: Take along equipment that can make fuel out of whatever you expect to find at the destination. Not an uncommon concept in sci-fi.

  • Not really important (Score:3)

    by Have Blue ( 616 ) on Friday June 15, 2001 @07:54AM (#148514) Homepage
    It's all nice and geeky and all that, but it would be better to go for depth of exploration than breadth- Know all there is to know about a small subset of the possibilities than try to get a little of everything.

    Instead of trying to explore every planet in the solar system at once, we should be returning men to the moon, or heading out to Mars. The latter, while far more expensive and complex, would gain us far more knowledge than these probes ever would

    (I would propose establishing a permanent presence on the Moon or Mars, but I'm trying to be at least slightly realistic :) )

  • Serious LAG (Score:4)

    by Sabalon ( 1684 ) on Friday June 15, 2001 @07:50AM (#148515)
    With a 2.5 to 3 hour round-trip light time between Earth and Saturn, flying anything on Titan has got to be a little dicey."

    And I thought lag on my cable modem was bad.

    I would assume some system would be incorporated to have it auto-navigate.
    if(mountain) turn left;

  • Dicey? (Score:1)

    by robbo ( 4388 )
    I'm not sure it would be so dicey-- imagine how much harder (or at least taxing) it would be to control a ground-based rover. Put yer blimp on autopilot, get it to take lots of pictures and contact ground control in a few hours. That seems like a good idea..
  • heh, that was the aerialbots, and I collected all five :)
  • Ah, but you (and many people) make a mistake when assuming that Martian outposts must have a sealed environment. The Martian atmosphere contains carbon dioxide, and with a suitable energy source it's not even difficult to extract oxygen from it. If this extracted O2 is catalyzed with hydrogen, they can even make their own water (the hydrogen would have to be imported though...it exists in only trace amounts in the Martian atmosphere.)

    For every problem proposed, there is a solution. The truth of the matter is that we could have had men (and women) living on Mars over a decade ago, but governments apparently don't see the value in it. My only hope is that private industry will see the value in Mars and begin funding some private projects.
  • The Clarke novel about Titan you're thinking of is Imperial Earth.
    There's also a rather good Baxter one, entitled Titan.
  • Thin?
    Titan's atmosphere is certainly not thin. It essentially consists of both short-chain and long-chain hydrocarbons - rather dense air!
  • sure, the nasa budget's been cut back and all, but, if they can construct a 6.5 meter robotic inflatable sphere to invade.. er.. explore mars, don't you think they could do a little better than spraypainting a soccer ball black and photoshopping it into a martian landscape with a shuttle astronaut in front?

    http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/adv_tech/rovers/Rovr_art/t mbl_fot.jpg [nasa.gov]

    yeesh..

  • Re:Not really important (Score:3)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Friday June 15, 2001 @08:01AM (#148522)
    but it would be better to go for depth of exploration than breaKnow all there is to know about a small subset of the possibilities than try to get a little of everything.
    Eventually, yes; but first you've got to know where the best place to look is.

    Consider mars: when Viking found nothing of profound interest, everyone said 'we looked in the wrong place'. Ditto pathfinder. Now that MGS has done a GS of M, we've a much better idea of good places to look. Sure the flood plain for pathfinder was a good idea, but we've much better data now about where water and/or life is/was likely to survive.
  • I have discovered through my work with TransOrbital Inc. [transorbital.net] on our lunar orbiter due for launch in December that putting an inflatable up is an administrative nightmare. You see, they get classed as deployabe, untethered ICBM decoys due to some short-sighted treaty wording. Daft, eh?

    Vik :v)

  • What we need is (Score:4)

    by Scutter ( 18425 ) on Friday June 15, 2001 @08:36AM (#148524) Journal
    What we need is a good inflatable technology scientist. Paging Dr. Schlock...
  • Make it a HUGE pink elephant and you got a hell of a setting for a Pink Floyd gig!

    Or maybe a Disaster Area happening...

    /max
  • Jos Whedon, Buffy:TVS creator, has already pioneered using Zepplin technology over Neptune for an upcoming episode [fury.com].

    Kevin Fox
    --
  • See Clarke's little story, "A Meeting with Medusa", for thoughts on loop delays in controlling seriously remote vehicles, as well as a very good read.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Aside from your post being entirely on-topic on an off-topic post, it is as well not at all un-anal retentive and pedantic.

    Hay, just like this one!

  • .. (Score:1)

    by vbrtrmn ( 62760 )
    Aerobots transform and roll-out!

    --
    microsoft, it's what's for dinner

    bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com

  • funny (Score:3)

    by joq ( 63625 ) on Friday June 15, 2001 @07:56AM (#148531) Homepage Journal

    Maybe NASA's JPL could team with DoubleClick or something to sell ad space, and raise money for NASA or even a charity. Sure it sounds stupid at first but wouldn't you like to think of yourself to have been the first to have your banner floating in space with the possibility of E.T.'s seeing it ;)
  • J P Aerospace [jpaerospace.com] are researching high altitude blimp platforms [jpaerospace.com] (20 miles up) for launch to LEO - basicly you blimp/balloon up to a floating launch platform, hop on a rocket and launch from there (thus avoiding the bulk of the atmosphere).

    JP are and interesting crowd - basicly a small-scale amateur space program

  • I also believe that inflatable space(wo)men are the answer to all of NASA's woes. This solution is only second to the "Russian Mail-order cosmonauts" in effectiveness.

    Prolixity

  • Hmmm, sad state of affairs to know that the above-linked site is now Slashdotted. :-)

  • Recently, bacterial ecosystems have been discovered in Earth's clouds [spaceref.com]. This opens the possibility of using balloons on Venus [nasa.gov] to inject heat and acid loving bacteria [icm.uu.se] into Venus' cloud droplets [wisc.edu]at 40-50 Km. Let's start colonizing space today!
  • That same scheme was proposed for the moon landing, and was quickly denied by NASA. They don't seem to like sending people to die on another world with no hope of ever returning.
  • Its unfortunate, but these agencies have become slow moving because of all the bad recoil from the "Faster, better, cheaper" plan, which led to quite a few million dollar failures. When dealing with this of this complexity, its probably better to move slow and ensure it will work the first time, instead of just throwing the GNP of some small nation away in the Martian atmosphere.
  • Buddy... that's

    "All these worlds
    are yours
    Except Europa
    Attempt no landings there.
    Explore them together
    Explore them in peace."
  • You'd barely need any gas at all. As the outside pressure would be zero, you could blow in it before launching and the breath should expand the whole thing.
  • 1) It floats with the wind. That's one of the nice things about airships. It's actually much harder to crash an airship with high winds (well, at high altitudes, anyway -- once you're down among mountains, etc. it's a different story) than an airplane.

    2) Who cares? Thing gets bounced around, maybe thrown off course, when the wind calms down it just goes back to what it's supposed to be doing.

    3) Probably less than a lot of other options for exploring Titan, so the real question is: do you think Titan is worth exploring, or are you an imagination-impaired Luddite? (There is no third option.)

  • Aberystwyth Uni doing same (Score:3)

    by illtud ( 115152 ) on Friday June 15, 2001 @08:12AM (#148541)
    Aberystwyth (Wales, UK) have a research project into 'aerobots' designed for planetary exploration. See introduction:

    http://users.aber.ac.uk/ajs99/Altairhtml/Altair.sh tml [aber.ac.uk]

    and photos:

    http://users.aber.ac.uk/ajs99/Altairhtml/presspics .shtml [aber.ac.uk]

    I'm not connected with them, I just work down the road.

  • Find out what I'm talking about at http://www.sluggy.com . In my opinion, anyone who can build an inflatable time machine should not have any great problem with airships. Probably.

  • You're right you know, ceiling fans are a constant danger on Titan. Lets hope NASA have thought of this problem, and turn them off somehow.

    As the other replyer pointed out, Titan has a remarkably thick atmosphere, thanks to the insanely large number of active volcanoes. These are triggered by the magnetic field of Jupiter throwing vast quantities of energy into the planet as it orbits.
  • Doh! Wrong gas giant. Serves me right for typing all that straight from five-year-old memory.
  • Oops. Duh.

    --

  • Re:Serious LAG (Score:3)

    by seanmeister ( 156224 ) on Friday June 15, 2001 @09:19AM (#148546)
    I think it's safe to say that you could fly through the mountains, or just about any other surface feature, on Saturn.

    --
  • Either that or get the guy that's been playing Counter-strike on a Pentium 133 over a 33.6k modem to fly it.

    He would obviously be used to that kind of thing.

  • ... NASA finally has the balls [nasa.gov] for space exploration. Har har
  • thermite.

    The slashdot 2 minute between postings limit:
    Pissing off coffee drinking /.'ers since Spring 2001.

  • Did you take this out of a sci-fi book? I swear that I read it somewhere (I'm thinking something of a discussion between two people while in hyperspace). Deja-vu.

    The slashdot 2 minute between postings limit:
    Pissing off coffee drinking /.'ers since Spring 2001.

  • I once discussed something vaguely similar with a somewhat science-illiterate friend, and he expressed horror at the idea.

    "Blimps?! On a GAS GIANT?" he gagged. "One spark and the whole damn planet would turn into a supernova! This would make the Hindenburg look like a firecracker! It's dangerous! Mankind's arrogance is going to destroy the universe... blah, blah... "

    It took two hours to explaining to tell him why this would not happen (because of a lack of anything for the methane gas to combust WITH, like OXYGEN).

    Some people...

  • (I would propose establishing a permanent presence on the Moon or Mars, but I'm trying to be at least slightly realistic :) )

    Oddly enough, it would probably be cheaper to establish a permanent presence on Mars than to conduct a there-and-back mission. The logistics involved in returning to orbit from the Martian surface and boosting back to Earth get hairy. If you can find volunteers willing to go to Mars with virtually no hope of returning in their lifetimes, you can massively reduce the size (and hence cost) of the vehicle(s) required. What's more, using a scheme like Zubrin's Mars Direct [nw.net], you can robotically land supplies, power and atmosphere generation gear, and the like before the colonists arrive, and supplementary supplies afterward on a continuing basis.

    I'm not sure the public is ready to support a one-way Mars colony project, but I'm sure there would be no shortage of volunteers.

    --

  • Read the Mars Direct site I posted. You'll find that the bulk of the mission complexity and cost involves return-flight issues. It's not that fuel is expensive, it's that hauling it out to Mars or generating (some of) it in situ there, and making a lander that can also take off again and reach Mars orbit, are hard/expensive propositions.

    --

  • And I thought lag on my cable modem was bad.
    I would assume some system would be incorporated to have it auto-navigate.
    if(mountain) turn left;

    You need some Artificial Intelligence stuff. Since Titan is one of the better candidates for native life in the solar system, it is always nice to have the "Run Away!" option.

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

  • All the worlds are yours
    Except Europa
    Dont attempt to land in Europa
    Explore them together, Explore them in peace..

    David Bowman
  • I agree. There are bacteria that live right next to underwater lava flows, there are bacteria that love to munch sulfur -- ship a few canisters to Venus and wait a couple million years. It'd be ripe for a colony right up until the Sun explodes. Of course, if it is too hot on Venus, they could always try this trick [observer.co.uk] with it.
  • Maybe NASA's JPL could team with DoubleClick or something ... have your banner floating in space with the possibility of E.T.'s seeing it ;)

    "All your cool, refreshing, Coca-Cola Classic are belong to us."

    (god, I can't believe that I stooped to this low rung of slashdotting)
  • You need big balls to explore Titan. And there is Zeus's example of how to deal with titans...

    I'm sure that NASA's way ahead of any armchair astronaut like myself, but I hope that they've got moby protocols for sterile contact with any place that might have life.

    It'd be a bitch to have a probe report "Yes, there was native life. Now it's all just e. coli". Arthur C. Clarke did one such story about life at the Venus poles. A Wind From The Sun collection.

    But then we already know that there's life on Venus: ;^P
    "I notice that we all believe that Venus has a methane atmosphere and is unlivable. I almost got run down by a freight locomotive the other day -- didn't look very uncivilized to me." - L. Ron Hubbard, "Between Lives Implants" lecture, SHSBC #317. 23 July 1963.
    http://www.xs4all.nl/~xemu/rams/Venusloc.ram

  • On a related note, inflatable habitat prototypes have been developed and tested, but Congress has actually forbidden further work on them.

    Here's a link [houstonpress.com] to an article from a few months ago. It has some neat photo's of a giant vacuum chamber used for testing the prototype.

    Eris

  • "Early tests with scale models of inflatable rovers showed that this type of vehicle could easily scale rocks that were 1/3 the diameter of the wheels. Thus a wheel size of 1.5 m diameter was chosen to allow the rover to traverse well over 99% of the Martian surface. "

    ...if NASA landed one of these rovers on the 1% of the surface that it *couldn't* traverse?

  • Transform into Superion! Now go check out Titan for energy cubes!

  • What's sad.... (Score:5)

    by Anthony Boyd ( 242971 ) on Friday June 15, 2001 @08:03AM (#148562) Homepage

    ...is that, depite going to these pages and seeing the technology, I really feel in my gut that much of this is decades away. These agencies (NASA, JPL) seem so slow-moving. It seems crazy, but more and more I find I am pinning my dreams of space onto civilians like "Rocketguy" and Dennis Tito. It is frustrating to look at the new technologies and be so jaded about them, but what normal people are doing to get into space soon excites me in ways that NASA can't match.

  • Blow-up doll factories?


    Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
    Make doooooobieees?
  • Hey wind bag.... get better with the puns... ok?

  • This is just a NASA smokescreen (Score:5)

    by typical geek ( 261980 ) on Friday June 15, 2001 @07:59AM (#148565) Homepage
    covering up their real interest in inflatables in space.

    I can't say much more (NDA, you know), but think about normal, red blooded American men in space for 3 1/2 years on the round trip to Mars, and the cost to get one of these [realdoll.com] into orbit (at $10,000 a pound) for each astronaut.

    Yes, inflatables are the answer.

  • Oh no... (Score:4)

    by g0thm0g ( 264960 ) <g0thm0g AT hotmail DOT sucks DOT com> on Friday June 15, 2001 @07:49AM (#148566)
    Sir, we calculated the pressure in stones per square inch, not pounds! There goes another $4 million.
  • I believe the original poster was proposing establishing a permanent colony on Mars, where the colonists could live out their life there but not return to Earth, not sending a suicide mission to Mars.

    Tim
  • Also the blimp would sink about 3/4 the way to the core before stabilizing vs. about eight hundred tons per square inch outside.

  • Seconds, if you were lucky. Planets are constantly bombarded by tiny meteorites (and if high-speed ions can ignite even one reaction, you're looking at nanoseconds.)

    Of course, the argument it hasn't happened on Jupiter or whatever is that it can't because it already would have. This is the same argument used to defend new high-speed particle accelerators against claims they might create new, strange lower-energy states of matter that will cascade out of control until the entire Earth is consumed in minutes. There have been particles hitting all heavenly bodies at magnitudes higher speeds for billions of years and we don't see anything bizarre still in orbit around a still-existing sun.

  • On the other hand, that is the one reasonable explanation besides the unlikely "we're the first" to resolve the Fermii Paradox.

    Maybe physics should watch out for a horizon-effect danger.

  • Yeah, but the all-your-eggs-in-one-basket issue is going to choke one of these days and we'll all sit by for a few weeks until they run out of air and die. Imagine the Nightlines every night for that, NASA.

    Only when that happens will NASA take the middle road, pre-launching everything they'll need for an extended stay (not to mention ongoing supply updates.) THEN you may launch someone there, and don't forget a machine shop to fabricate things that will end up busted or improperly designed.

  • Uhh, actually, you're both wrong, it's All these worlds are yours except Europa Attempt no landings there. Use them together. Use them in peace.
  • A blimp is the last thing I would imagine that could be used for space exploration. Interesting to me is that the press release mentions that landing is handled via "inflatable wheel". Im sure the technology is there, but I can't help thinking of a large, pink baloon with soft wheels floating around Saturn's moons...
  • Why spend all this money of development, just put Rosanne Arnold in a Space suit and viola, Space Blimp.
    Aside from your post being entirely off-topic, it is as well not at all realistic. A human could not endure such conditions, and the amount of fuel required to get such a large payload into space is not all cost-effective.
  • Well, I thought it would be more humorous if I started the joke as a serious response to an un-serious post. I guess the 'joke' part of my post didn't seem that humorous. :(
  • Maybe NASA could borrow that Pig Blimp from Pink Floyd. That would be interesting to see float by Saturn or the dark side of the moon.

    Sorry, pun intended. I suck!

  • I find it hard to believe that a few million gallons of fuel is more expensive than the resources needed to keep humans alive indefinitely in a sealed environment and send them supplies from Earth as you propose.

    That statement makes it seem so simple, but I don't think you have any concept of what it takes to survive on Mars. Here [spaceref.com] is an article about a research program to study dust devils in Arizona, so they can be prepared for what's on Mars.

    Quoth the article:

    Mars dust is a major potential threat to both robotic and human exploration of the Red Planet. Enormous martian dust devils - 100 times larger than those on Earth -- churning tons of electrically charged dust particles could cause lightning bolts and discharges that might fry computers and delicate electronics, interfere with radio communications, or rip apart pressurized human habitat.

    Earth dust devils can be 10 meters to 20 meters in diameter and 1,000 meters (a kilometer or six-tenths of a mile) high, Smith said. Mars dust devils are typically a kilometer in diameter and 10 kilometers (6 miles) high. Martian dust devils are so big that they dust the planet's atmosphere, giving the atmosphere its reddish-brown hue, and so big that Mars Global Surveyor cameras have photographed them from orbit.

  • Correction (Score:3)

    by sllort ( 442574 ) on Friday June 15, 2001 @07:58AM (#148578) Homepage Journal
    This article is not about space blimps. It is about extra-planetary blimps. The distinction, of course, is that an extra-planetary blimp is inflated on a remote planet, and used for exploration. A true space blimp would be inflated in space. This would, of course, cause massive pressure on the hull, and provide no levitation since there is no gravity to push against and no differential air pressure to provide a lifting force.

    Space blimps do exist [campheaven.com], however. The article just doesn't mention them.

    This is the part of the post where I would whine about how the /. editors don't read the stories, if I were that kind of guy.
  • That's hilarious... but it got me thinking - if you could magically construct a planet, say a gas giant, and keep a good proportion of it as oxygen, how long could it last before spontaneous ignition occurs? I remember touching on certain rare chemical events in an astronomy class - like a star depends on these events for fusion to occur, something like 14 times per second it occurs in our sun (not combustion, but some sort of rare collision between certain atoms). I'd imagine the crushing pressure from gravity would limit the size of such a planet, but how big could it get? (... sounds like a fair question for the final exam!)
  • With a 2.5 to 3 hour round-trip light time between Earth and Saturn, flying anything on Titan has got to be a little dicey.

    Oh yeah, I'm sure they'll try realtime remote control... :-P

    FYI, even the Mars rover (much closer and moving on the ground at a snails pace) was never controlled in realtime. These zepellins will be autonomous, with flight plan updates arriving as needed.

  • Scientists and inventors help make a writer's imagination reality. Sluggy Freelance [sluggy.com]
  • Of course, that's why the experiments they are doing with those AI controlled satellites is so important. Just as interesting is a report I saw some time back about using a swarm of robotic "bugs" to basically shotgun a wide area on a planet or sprinkle throughout asteroid field. These would then work together with either a ground based or orbiting base station (which could beam the results back to earth, the bugs would be too small to do more than talk to the base station) and greatly extend its area of study. In this case rather than drop them directly from space, you carry them on a blimp and once it is over a nice looking area, you shoot them out in a spread. That would let you build cheaper bug bots which didn't have to survive a full re-entry from space. Then the blimp could just take pictures until it crashed and no one would really care because the orbiter or a base station also dropped from the blimp would continue its work on the ground.
  • Since they weigh only 100 kgs, it could be a good idea to send several of these blimps on a mission together. Really cheap complete solar exploitation. They don't mention anything about if blimps work on Jupiter and other gas balls. Sending a couple of them to the same body, would greatly increase the speed of data gathering. Just because your not paranoid - Doesn't mean your not being followed.
  • In the article it said that it would be going above the "Thick" atmosphere to transmit to earth. That's thin isn't it? But seriously, do you think a friggin blimp is the ticket to continuous exploration of Titan?
    Peace!!
    ShortedOut
  • We can't send a human being around the world in a balloon, what makes us think that we can send a helium filled balloon to Titan, and have it successfully circumnavigate that moon without any problems?
    We can't even use those remote controlled balloons around the house without ripping it on a ceiling fan!
    It won't work guys, do not waste time, and money on this thing. You won't be able to make it light enough, and strong enough for a foreign atmosphere. The propellers alone would have to be like 21 feet long to work in that thin of atmosphere!!!
    Peace!!!
    ShortedOut

  • Re:Not really important (Score:4)

    by Zac Thompson ( 460069 ) on Friday June 15, 2001 @08:10AM (#148586)
    Actually, Titan is one of the few places in the solar system that is a really good candidate for supporting life natively. It has a nitrogen and hydrocarbon atmosphere, with plenty of the required building blocks for amino acids. It's bigger than Mercury or Pluto; the atmosphere is only about 60% higher pressure than Earth's ... I think there's a Clarke novel about Titan. Anyone? http://www.to-scorpio.com/titanfacts.htm

    Unfortunately, it's damn cold, but a human presence should start creating some global lunar warming right away ;)

  • How do we know if the blimps will work. I mean we can't blow them up on the ground because they will fry in the earths atmosphere and we can't blow them up in space because there is no air in space. And if you took an air pump or something of that nature into space it would most likely add a lot of weight and have a slight chance of throwing you off course from your destination. Just a thought.

  • Re:What we need is (Score:3)

    by loki*J ( 460434 ) on Friday June 15, 2001 @09:12AM (#148588)
    For those who didn't get this, www.sluggy.com

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