Ich gehe davon aus, dass diese Websites bereits die natürlich hergestellten Tunnel bis hin zu den unterirdischen Ozeanen haben werden.
https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1mmlyw8
Ich gehe davon aus, dass diese Websites bereits die natürlich hergestellten Tunnel bis hin zu den unterirdischen Ozeanen haben werden.
https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1mmlyw8
23 Kommentare
Cassini spacecraft has already sampled the geysers of Enceladus by flying through the water wapor. One could do it again, sure. It is probably easier. But will it result into more information?
My first thought is that the prospect of drilling through that ice and presumably taking samples as they go has geologists pitching well erected tents.
If we drilled, extraction would be under our control which sounds safer to me. If we go to where it’s spewing out there will be a lot in the area around us making it difficult to work & forcing us to use energy de-icing. It’s often more comfortable to be out in the snow when it’s stopped snowing, I think you would be fighting „snow“ or suspended frozen/freezing h20 to work near the geysers
My first thoughts are that the mist would ice uo the probe very quickly
Accessing the plumes makes way more sense than actually trying to get to the sea underneath.
The whole idea of trying to drill/melt through is absolutely ridiculous. Here on Earth we have drilled 12km down into **solid** rock. Icey moons are thought to have crusts at least 5km or more thick, and ice moves around a lot, freezing, melting and refreezing. The hole is just going to collapse on itself, unless it fills up before that and freezes.
The amount of energy keeping the hole open for a power and comms cable would need would be incredible! 5-20km of heating up -200 degrees C ice, in a place where solar panels produce little electricity.
I’m sure it can be done at some point in the future, but for now going for the plumes makes so much more sense!
It might be true, if you knew where the subsurface tunnel was going. However, if you were flying blind, I suspect that would make it more difficult. You need greater propulsion (because the flow of stuff is out) and also a way to deal with the material being ejected.
Isn’t this what Europa Clipper is supposed to do when it arrives in 2030?
Flying through the ejecta has been done. But going down to the surface site would be quite dangerous I would think. That is likely quite a dynamic event to send that heavy water geyser so far into space. And the area around it might be very unstable.
I don’t think it’s easier to get through a pressurized tunnel in the wrong direction.
The problem is that the cracks where the water is escaping seal and freeze so in some cases they might not be there when something lands there to sample. So you equip the instrument with a drill so it can be sure to make a hole where you need it.
That’s my thought process…fwiw.
An rtg sounds a neat idea until it causes the extinction of the ancient, sentient but unshielded Enceladan civilization currently thriving below the ice sheets
We don’t send probes down a volcano to explore the inside of the earth. Might be better to get a radar image or two before jeapardizing something so far away
I don’t know if NASA’s position has changed since the last time the argument for using RTG’s came up.
But they seemed very against having our first potential contact to be through irradiating it. I think that fear is overblown but I also don’t work for NASA. So I may be biased as it is the simpler faster solution.
No. The locations where liquids are being ejected are likely to be non homogenous and full of chambers and caverns and other structures that would make drilling problematic.
A nuclear heated melting ‚drill‘ exploration module could just melt itself through the ice and sink down into the subsurface ocean unspooling a fiber optic cable behind it attached to a surface transmission station that would freeze into the ice as it reformed behind the drill module. The more homogenous the ice, the simpler the operation would go.
It would be like a heated bathysphere than a drilling rig.
There is an obvious answer: do both.
Huge technological challenges involved in either approach which will undoubtedly result in new, spin-off tech that humans could benefit from.
Hear me out.. could we use geysers on low gravity moons like this to launch back into space
You are making a huge assumption that such vents are even navigable to begin with, and then to what?
Even if you were to resist the significant outflow pressure, it could simply be emitted from a morass of crevices and cracks, fissures within, maybe even just a bunch of small holes around possibly brittle and poorly formed structures, with no control over such conditions.
Perhaps finding a dormant geyser system would yield better results for exploration of such a system, but if the goal is to penetrate below the surface ice, then most direct route with more predictable conditions is still most likely going to be a controlled bore hole over a more stable region of ice.
That’s my opinion at least.
Why would you want to fight against that kind of pressure and volume of flowing liquid??? that’d be like going up stream of a white water rapid, way more work than necessary. I’d start a brand new virgin hole and lock a plug in place behind it so that when the probe does break through it only has to deal with the pressure and not a high volume flow of a geyser and pressure combined. see.
Seems – if you could map out current breaks in the crust (where the plumes are coming from) and attempt to isolate one that is closing up / has just closed up – you could avoid the pressure differential problem and potentially benefit from the free bore hole. But idk, ice is fickle
Have there been any missions with ice penetrating radar surveys on either moon to see where the thickest and thinnest crust is located? I think that needs to happen first then that kind of information will dictate probe design and entry location, Yes/no? Far as I remember only fly by through the ejecta has happened.
No, I don’t think trying to land on a seismically unstable site is better.
i mean, yes, to get samples… no to get the best samples. and, i’d assume nothing is stable there.
Ever stood next to a hole in an ice pond and felt it start to crack under your feet?
There’s also the matter of scale. Those are not small fissures like in a sidewalk. Those are cracked fault lines in shifting ice sheets.