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from the All-these-worlds-are-yours-except-Europa.-Attempt-no-landing-there dept.
Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire backer of Breakthrough Initiatives and Breakthrough Prizes, has set his sights on Saturn's moon Enceladus:
Milner founded the $100 million Breakthrough Starshot project, an attempt to send small probes to Alpha Centauri. Now, he has announced plans to explore funding a mission to Enceladus.
[...] "Can we design a low-cost, privately funded mission to Enceladus which can be launched relatively soon, and that can look more thoroughly at those plumes, try to see what's going on there?" Milner asked the New Space Age conference in Seattle this week.
A probe to Enceladus could be done for well under $1 billion, but it likely wouldn't be able to drill through the icy surface.
The Cassini spacecraft already flew as close as 49 km above the surface of Enceladus, and flew through a plume of water vapor released by the satellite. A proposed mission such as the Enceladus Life Finder could repeatedly fly through plumes and use better sensors to attempt to detect evidence of organic materials or microbes.
Two upcoming missions will be studying Jupiter's moon Europa: the ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer and NASA's Europa Clipper. Europa is easier for spacecraft to reach than Enceladus, but has thicker ice blocking its internal ocean.
Also at Newsweek.
Related: NASA Releases Europa Lander Study 2016 Report
Hydrogen Emitted by Enceladus, More Evidence of Plumes at Europa
Could a Dedicated Mission to Enceladus Detect Microbial Life There?
How the Cassini Mission Led a 'Paradigm Shift' in Search for Alien Life
Cassini Spacecraft Post-Mortem
Porous Core Could be Keeping Enceladus Warm
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday November 25 2017, @03:33AM (2 children)
Even at Indian ISRO prices, it would be extraordinarily difficult, something never attempted before. I am guessing it would require a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, adding to the costs and safety considerations for the mission.
The technology would still need to be developed, which has its costs. Here is a rudimentary one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceMole [wikipedia.org]
And what do you do once you've drilled through a few kilometers of ice? Hopefully, you can convert the drill into a submersible.
From Newsweek:
It seems that his interest is in flying into the plumes a lot more and leaving the drilling action to a future mission.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday November 25 2017, @07:01AM (1 child)
SpaceX does better than that. One could put a metric ton in LEO for around $6 million [wikipedia.org], using the Falcon 9 and it'll probably drop significantly with their current launch rate.
I would suggest americium 241, strontium 90, or even tritium for the radioactive component of the RTG. All three are rather widely available with a half life viable for the proposed mission and fairly low risk at launch (keep in mind that one would be dropping them in ocean, in the course of a launch failure).
Sample the fluid down there. Looking at this, I see an obvious way to do this. Instead of drilling in the normal way, melt your way down and back up. An RTG would be ideal for melting through ice.
First, when landing, have the probe configured into a more compact form so that it is significantly more dense than water ice. Use the heat from the RTG to slow melt your way through the ice. Then when one gets to the desired depth/pressure and is finished with the sampling, generate gas in attached ballast tanks so that the probe has negative buoyancy. Melt back up to the surface. The probe would be out of communication range for most of the trip though one might be able to communicate via very low frequency radio with a satellite in orbit around Enceladus.
You could even do some test runs where you melt your way a little down so that you can determine problems with the concept while still in radio contact with an orbiting satellite.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @07:08PM
I would suggest not.