How are we going to drill through 25km of ice

>>8906377
>20+km wired connection is almost equally futile
That's actually not that much wire, especially if you're NASA who can come up with some sort of very thin yet strong wire. The boring probe would carry a spool with it during its descent, and the ice refreezing above the boring probe would support the wire. It would only have to transmit data since the part melting through the ice would already have onboard power from the RTG. That would let you use something like a single strand of fiber optic cable which is extremely thin and threadlike yet reasonably strong. That would provide plenty of bandwidth for several HD video streams up to the lander on the surface, at the very least.

tl;dr: stop being a know it all

Why not install wireless relays at intervals as it drills down
Drill into the wall of the hole and push an rf transmitter-receiver into it

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>>8906377
I suppose there's always pic related.

Europa has geysers though - so it can't be that thick everywhere.

Would need several exploratory expeditions to find sweet spots though, so I kinda doubt we'll find anything within the century, if there's anything to find.

>>8906377
We won't live long enough to find it out anyways.

Hurts so much

>>8906377
le melt through it with a nuclear reactor
problem solveded

>>8906710
>doesn't understand what a radioisotope thermal generator is
Not gonna make it

>>8906377
nukes.

for what purpose would there be to do this?

Why would you spend billions to send a fucking drill to there instead of machinery to produce rocket fuel/habitats

>>8906377
>but you still have the issue of getting the data back to Earth.
what is a cable?

casaba howitzer

>>8906717
Curiosity uses one NASA MMRTG. which produces 110 watts of electricity and produces enough waste heat to keep the rover warm.

A Europa lander/driller/submarine prove would have to use many MMRTGs. at least two for the lander.. then 4 or more for the probe as it melts down and gets to work.

>>8906781
because there might be life on Europa.

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>>8906377
Big metal drill with a radioactive block of material used to heat it.

>>8906377
Basically like this on a larger scale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM3zP72-rJE
Just apply pressure and wait. Give your submarine a shape which will make sure that it always rests it's whole weight on one point, this should let it melt the ice under it and slowly go throught the ice make it so that you need to wait a year or two. It takes no recources and isn't really hard if you design the submarine right.

>>8906377
The chances of there actually being life on Europa, or Enceladus, or anywhere in this solar system is effectively zero, and I think the scientists who really study this stuff know that. They just talk up the idea because it gets them funding and they get probes sent to those places to better study environments that could potentially harbour life.

>>8907128
Intelligent life anywhere in our solar system is effectively 0
Ftfy

>>8906826
RTGs for satellites put out kilowatt levels of energy.

>>8906377
You answered your own question. 20 km+ wired connections have been used on robots before. The Nereus ROV had a fiberoptic tether 40 km long.

Of course a tether this long is heavy and we don't understand europa's ice all that well. We don't know if it shifts around or if the ocean is really that deep.

>> wireless out of the question
Not entirely. Ice is relatively transparent to radiowaves for the same reason microwaves suck at heating up completely frozen food. Things like ice penetrating radar exist

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>>8906377
We wait for our alien overlords to ignite Jupiter and melt the ice

>>8907582
you would have to add dozens of jupiters to jupiter, to have enough mass for the smallest and coldest red dwarf.

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>>8906377
>Our only chance of finding life in our solar system
Nope. It's one of several possibilities

>probably the universe for many centuries
Still no.
Even possible improvements in radio receiver technology could lead to discovery of intelligent life.
And "many centuries" is unduly pessimistic for interstellar travel.

>>can't even reach it
"Can't"?
Wow, Anon, why don't you just open a vein and get it over with?

>>8906497
that might work if the tunnel stayed open but it'll refreeze behind the probe, and rf doesnt transmit worth a shit through ice.

>>8906424
this is probably the best bet.

>>8907665
inverse square law and and the speed of light make finding intelligent life more than a few light years away very improbable.

>>8906377
>drill through 25km of ice
not gonna drill it, Skillet
gonna melt it

We gotta train the best drillers to become astronauts.

>>8906377
ATTEMPT

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Unsurprisingly this exact idea has already been thought about and even tested in Alaska

http://www.space.com/29644-cryobot-tunneling-robot-explore-icy-moons.html

also
>Named VALKYRIE (Very deep Autonomous Laser-powered Kilowatt-class Yo-yoing Robotic Ice Explorer)
NASA's acronym game is weak

>>8907674
>more than a few light years away
And what if it's closer than that?

>speed of light
I don't get this angle.
If we made a receiver sensitive enough, it could pick up decades (or centuries) old signals.
Speed of light would hamper conversing, but not detection.

put salt on it

>>8906377
build a nuclear powerplant there and let it have a nuclear meltdown

>>8906377
BBC designed drilling machinery.

>>8906377
>it hurts
Only because you are retarded. Save your brain power for asking me if I want super size my combo.

We use a microwave.

No, I am serious here. Specifically the magnetron on a microwave, attack it to a wave guide "akin" to a tin can, with an RTG to power it. It will heat the water to bore through the ice making a secondary probe.

Our secondary probe will transmit data back to the lander on frequencies transparent to ice, which transmits the information to us.

We cant even drill 20 km down on earth what the fuck

>>8908004
there is no place on earth where there is 20 km of ice to drill through

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>>8906518
>We won't live long enough to find it out anyways.
>WE'RE KILLIN' MOTHER GAIA, MA-A-A-A-AN

Well, you certainly won't, you filthy pot-sucking hippie degenerate.

>>8908291
I think he may have been referring to human life expectancy

>>8906377
NTBM
>http://www.sheepletv.com/nuclear-tunnel-boring-machines-switzerland-has-nothing-on-us-2/

>>8907674
There aren't any transmissions to pick up. If there was itelligent, space faring life anywhere nearby, chances are they'd blot out thousands of suns already with dyson swarms

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>>8908392
>implying there are not better ways of collecting energy for a powerhungry advanced civilization that don't involve overcompensating megastructures screaming "I'm here, fuck me up"

>Not just sending a relativistic speed projectile to smash the ice

The memedrive should take care of it.

>>8907793
NO

>>8906377
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
>12km
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AE5pQ6O1FM

>>8909117
LANDINGS

>>8906377
>>Our only chance of finding life in our solar system, and probably the universe for many centuries
It's extremely improbable that there's life down there. Why do you even get your hopes up?

>>8907669
It does not have to stay open, since the borer is carrying the spool.

>>8909310
THERE

>>8906377
Europa has cracks in the ice crust.

Probs weaker and thinner ice.

>>8909337
JUST

>>8909351
KIDDING

>>8909355
FREE

>>8909356
EUROPAN

>>8909359
FISH

>>8909363
SANDWHICHES

>>8906377
Pretty easy to do because Europa doesnt have that annoying shit called magma that will burst through your hole the closer you get to the mantle.

>>8909367
FOR

>>8909370
FIRST

>>8909371
FIFTY

>>8907128
Europa has water so it will have life, bacteria can be found in sulfur lakes on our planet anon, and the first living things existed when this rock was basically Venus's bigger brother 4.1 billion years ago.

>>8909375
LANDERS

>>8909376
prove it then.

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Here's the 4chan gold standard MS paint schematic diagram that everyone asked for.

>>8909379
WHO

>>8909400
Your lander looks to be doing a shit on Enceladus

>>8909486
It'll be the most scientific shit that will ever have been shat.

>>8906424
I don't know if I like the odds though.
>your entire mission is dependent on a single 20km strand of fiber optic

>>8906377
>How are we going to drill through 25km of ice

Just drop a kilo of Uranium on it, it will melt thru.

>>8908291
Pretty sure he meant 'we' in the sense of people who are alive today

>>8909528
Neil tyson has some competition?

>>8909400
those solar panels would have to be huge to even power anything on enchiladas. If you used it on Europe you'd need the 'computer n sheit' to be in a huge radiation proof bunker so that the probe doesn't get fried to hell

>>8909776
This is true, a particular challenge given that no space craft usually has radiation shielding.

Truly exceptional conditions

>>8908392
and how would you know if there were stars already covered by dyson "spheres" seeing that it's impossible to detect them?

>>8909833
Juno has a little bit of radiation shielding.

>>8909376
>The ability of DNA replicators to adapt to various environments means that those replicators will magically spring into existence anywhere there's water
People really believe this, don't they?

>>8910060
Life existed before water on earth anon, as the oceans are only 3.8 billion years old and life was here since 4.1 billion years ago.

>>8910137
How exactly does that work? The oldest evidence for life on Earth are fossils from underwater hydrothermal vents.

>>8910137
>life was here since 4.1 billion years ago.
i thought that oceans were 3.8 BYA and earliest signs are life are like 3.75 BYA or something

where does your 4.1 come from?

>>8906377
nukes

>>8910176
i should have just googled before asking but i'm too stupid
i guess oldest life signs are maybe as old as 4.28 but those still formed in underwater hydrothermal vents, it's just that so much of the water on the planet at that time was gas that technically the oceans didn't exist yet but yeah, first life still occurred underwater

>>8906377

Would probably be much better off drilling than melting. The ice on Europa is around -160 C. You would need an incredible amount of power to warm that ice, then melt it, and I seriously doubt we could put a reactor that large onto the surface.

Curiosity has the largest RTG ever sent into space and it would take hundreds of years to melt through the surface at constant power output.

IMO we either need to use a drill or a kinetic impactor.

>>8907582
>what if we are the alien overlords

stop being a beta gamma lets get more alpha scientists

>>8907743
its extremely impossible to keep 20km of ice melted simultaneously so your wire can keep probing deeper. Most likely you'll get 500m before the ice behind you refreezes your wire into place permanently. goodbye billions of dollars of wasted taxpayer money on stupid scientists.

>>8910380
You can have the spool of cable in the probe

>nuclear-powered laser melts probe down to ocean, depositing a string of radio receiver buoys that freeze into place above it
>submarine pops out of probe and does submarine things, navigating with gyroscope and doppler velocity log
>final approach back to the probe base is with a really fucking bright light, it then hooks itself up and sends pictures of delicious space fish to NASA
The SIMPLE Artemis system is the one that seems to be getting traction now. It's made by Stone Aerospace and works nicely in Antarctica. Good luck googling it these guys fly pretty far under the radar.

>>8910380
Wow, you must be way smarter than those stupid scientists!

>>8908291
1.3/10 Worst new post

>>8908405
>doesn't know what a Dyson swarm is
>thinks there is a more efficient way of getting power in space than parking next to a star
>>8909852
>spheres
No spheres, nigger. Swarms.
>how could we see them
All that heat still has to dissipate somehow. Specifically, a dyson swarm would be very faint or invisible in visible light but really bright at room temperature IR wavelengths. If you'd read more than an introductory pop sci clickbait article paragraph on the subject you'd know this

>>8910309
>The ice on Europa is around -160 C. You would need an incredible amount of power to warm that ice, then melt it, and I seriously doubt we could put a reactor that large onto the surface.
Ice specific heat capacity - 2.1kJ/kg
Water enthalpy of fusion - 335kJ/kg
Ice temperature (according to you) - -160°C, which is equal to required delta T in K anyways
So you need 337kJ to warm the ice to 0°C plus an additional 335 to melt it. Which means the super cool environment only increases the amount of power required about two times. Of course, this is an idealized 100% efficient process, but it's not as much of a difference as you'd imagine.

If you wanted to melt, say, a cylindrical hole 0.5 meters in diameter and have 66kW of power available and perfect efficiency, you can bore a cylindrical volume 0.5mm deep every second. This means you can tunnel the 20km in 1.2 years. If you can deal with say, 5-10 years it becomes very doable with technology not much more advanced than what we already have.

Of course, there just isn't any way to do this without nuclear power.

>>8909572
Yea, like the module while coming to Europa

>>8910380
It's ok, just put the cable in the probe instead of the surface module

>>8907128
>chances are effectively zero
Based on current data gathered from one (1) life-supporting planet.

Even if there's nothing there it will have been worth it to discover that.

>>8910380
The engineering research generated by that failure will feed back into the economy at a greater rate than if the funds had just been pent up in Cayman banks being used for the great retarded game of asset speculation.

Why not fire a bunch of nukes in succession at the same spot to smash up the ice then land the probe in the new surface ocean

>>8910185
No life began underground then cane out the hydro thermal vents.

>>8911210
Because a nuke is a terribly inefficient way to dig a deep, narrow hole. I mean, you can blast a hole the size of Wales in the ice to get 20km down while also actually ejecting the material, but just about any other method is going to be cheaper and less destructive. Not to mention the fact that nuking the place you want to find life in is generally counterproductive.

>>8911338
>MUH LIFE
fuck off nuke it already

>>8911338

Uranium is hot to the touch, just dump some on the ice and let it melt its way thru.

>>8911348
I don't know if you're being deliberately thick, but in case you're not:
The aim is to get a probe down there. Not to melt the ice. We want to study what is under the ice, not just make a big hole for shits a giggles.

>>8911347
>nuke Europa
>Earth gets invaded by giant pissed off Europan Space Squids

dickhead

>>8911394
>Europan Space Squids
Are they muslim?

Spess bump

>>8907128
>t. Europa fish poster

>>8906781

So the Japanese can use Europan fish to make sushi after all the dolphins and whales are extinct and all the tuna has too much mercury.

>>8909549
I'm scared about this too guys!

9000 spools?

>>8909400
I can actually picture Trump presenting something like this. Not the concept, just the words, expressions and so on.

>>8909400
>lasers
Lasers are ridiculously energy inefficient. You're better off using open cycle cooling for your reactor aka putting the core on the ice to melt it directly. And you'll have a reactor because
>solar panels
Only produce 4% of the power they do on earth per unit of area. Aka you'll need an absolute ass load of them.
>>8913839
Nice derail attempt. Fuck off to /pol/ or /int/ or wherever

>>8906512
>several exploratory expeditions

No, we'd need exactly one single Europa orbiter capable of taking gravimetric data to find any significant thin spots in the ice crust.

>>8911409
Everything is inherently Muslim.

>>8907558
The ice probably doesn't shift around significantly fast enough to matter to a Europa melt probe mission. To be safe we'd probably just pick a landing site on the center of one of the ice plates, as it's less likely to have any shifting there at all.

>>8908392

Dyson spheres are really easy to see, because they still need to put out the energy output of a star, except that entire output would be in the infrared spectrum instead of the visible light spectrum.

>>8906377
>not just repeatedly nuking it

>>8913896
YES, EXACTLY, BRAINLET

Which is why the fermi paradox exists.

>>8911392
Uranium goes in first.
Sinks to bottom.
Probe goes in second.

>>8913938
Do you mean an actively fissioning core of uranium, or just a subcritical block aka an RTG? Because you can't make uranium rtgs, no stable isotopes exist with a half life in the appropriate range (few decades to few centuries).

>>8913938
>>8913944
And besides, rtgs don't really output enough heat to make for a practical mission. You need a tens of KW to melt a reasonably sized hole within a decade.

Instead of/as well as having solar panels attached to the lander, it could have a microwave receiver to catch power being beamed down from an orbiting satellite. The Stratfor guy seems to think our military will have these things in fairly short order, and I'm sure DARPA is working on it. Gotta power those exoskeletons...

For the cable, it seems like we need to measure the ice beforehand so we can send enough but not too much. It's one hell of a single failure point, in any case.

>>8906424
This is a super cool Idea. What is the heating rate you need to get under the ice within a year?

>>8911172
>>8913962
Multiply by 1/efficiency to get actual time. Multiply by available power to get actual time.

>>8913979
*multiply the 1.2 years by 66kW/(available power*efficiency of process)

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Bring a mini nuclear reactor and let it melt its way down through the ice.
Then drop the drone down to measure the water for life.
Use laser to message data back up through the tunnel.

>>8913987
Good idea fren

What's going to go wrong?
Everything on the surface is going to get covered in ice, you can pretty much count on that.
The cable's going to fail, so better have 3 or 4 fibers bundled together for backup.
RTG is rock solid, or we'll at least pretend it is.
The ice will shift and pinch the drill head, so a system should be put in to take care of that. The whole thing should be able to heat up to melt through any weird pinch spots.
Also, the ice won't be pure ice. It's going to hit a layer of gravel or million year old silt-crete or something. How to get through that? That's a toughie. Is this thing going to have an actual rock drill head?
What's the pressure going to be like, and can everything in the drill head take it? Cameras?
I seriously doubt that it'll be just open water when the drill finally gets all the way through the ice, not the way it is under our icecaps. Maybe the drill head could have a robot arm or something to deal with anything unexpected. Maybe I just like robot arms.

>>8911152
for all we know, advanced alien civilizations could create energy out of thin air

>>8914003
>for all we know god created this universe specifically to fuck with me
Everything we know suggests they can't. So the most likely explanation is that there simply aren't any nearby. It's not certain, but nothing is ever certain.

>>8914067
I have a problem with your statement that there is no more efficient power source than a dyson sphere
For example, star lifting would be more efficient than dyson sphere, and there might be many other ways of getting energy that we dont know about due to the limits of our theoretical physics

>>8914095
How will you power your stellar engineering efforts? Star lifting would be a nice way to get matter for all kinds of purposes and extend the lifetime of your star, but I doubt you can extract energy from it at a net positive.

>>8906377
>wasting this many resources on a pipe dream of finding microbial life by throwing mining resources at a crust miles deep for little forseeable gain
Its basically a multibillion dollar mission to go your backyard and see if anything is living there, how does one justify the cost?

No politician in his right mind would do this

>>8913886
We don't know that for sure.

>>8913959
Yeah that's going to have a higher mass cost than just using radioisotopes

>> power exoskeletons by microwaving soldiers
No anon, just no

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>>8913848
You've found a flaw in a design made with bad grammar and ms paint

Congrats

>>8914525
They're not going to microwave the individual soldiers' suits, they'll have a collection device where the soldiers plug in to charge. Cut the power to the surrounding area and your soldiers are the only ones with power? Not just yes but hell yes.
This is war in a few decades.

a really hot wire

that's it

>>8914247

Still a better use of money than welfare and wars for (((American interests)))

>>8906377
>How are we going to drill through 25km of ice
don't ask me it's a problem for lowly engineers

>>8907953

It doesn't have to melt down to penetrate the ice. It only needs to reach a temperature higher than 100°C and the ice will sublimate into steam.

>>8906826, >>8907342 is right. The rover RTG generates 110 watts of electricity but only because producing electricity with thermocouples is so inefficient, the actual amount of power generated is 2,000 watts in thermal energy (RTGs < 10% efficiency). Also, NASA is developing actual nuclear fission reactors to put into space that will generate up to 40 kw thermal.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20160012354.pdf

>>8909400
lmaooo that is actually hilarious

>>8909999
checked

>>8913023
> Europa fish poster


My sides

>>8915191
Well if you use microwaves, both the antenna and microwave transmitter will need to be quite large.

>>8910350

Huxter.

It's simple.
You hire Bruce Willis.

>>8911197
>Broken ice sheet fallacy

>>8906377
I think we could send a fission powered autonomous device that can melt a hole through the ice, collect some data over a period of a couple months, and then come back to the surface and beam the data home. Obviously its density would have to be close to the density of water for it to be able to come back to the surface. By the time we would be capable of sending something weighing a couple hundred tons there, we will probably have a narrow AI capable of not fucking up the mission.

>>8906424
The problem with that idea is that the hole would freeze over, and then the movements of the ice due to tidal flexing would tear the cable apart over time.

>>8917485
There has to be a way to sense the structure of the ice from orbit. Have the thing orbit while it finds a place to land where the ice doesn't move.

>orbiter - acts as relay
>lander - acts as antenna and drill platform
>drill - acts as arab bull penetrating europa, carries virulent sub, everything nicely attached with cables and full of sciency equipment stuff

Okay. Cassini-huygens was about 6 tons roughly half of that fuel and it could do only flybys around the moons. True, it was on saturn but who cares its the same shit. The europa lander-drill will probably be bigger since it's more than orbiter and small useless drop pods that even cheated with parachutes in thick atmosphere instead of propulsive landing in vacuum. Them wires gotta be good you don't want your drill or sub getting lost...
Do we even have a rocket that can get that kind of payload to jupiter without eons worth of gravity assists?

>>8917485
>>8918312
Have it land on one of the poles then.

Also do we have any ground penetrating radar surveys of Europa's ice sheet?

>>8914247
t. Xing Chang Long Dong Wi