So they could afford to do things more like this.
It’s always a little unnerving to me to see them fly through the ring plane. It makes you realize that as striking they are in appearance, the mass density is very slight, and there’s plenty of open space in there. Not that they couldn’t have had a collision, but they haven’t.
OK, I know, even if they weren’t being forced to waste money, they’d still have trouble getting more funding for more planetary missions.
You’re assuming their budget would remain undisturbed in the absence of pork. Without pork NASA serves no purpose, and it’s budget would likely be slashed significantly.
The video was produced by digital manipulation of photos from Cassini, and I don’t believe it represents the spacecraft’s actual trajectory. As a rule, they don’t fly through the rings (except the very tenuous E ring). During its initial insertion to Saturn orbit, Cassini did fly through the gap between the F and G rings, and during this maneuver it was oriented to position the high-gain antenna as a shield against possible ring particle impacts. Even though passing through the ‘gap’, the spacecraft did strike microscopic dust particles up to 680 times per second for about 5 minutes during the transit.
This reminds me that Saturn would make a pretty good planet to make a colony on. It’s the planet with a gravity closest to Earth IIRC, and plenty of resources available in the gaseous atmosphere and all those moons.
I’d blow a really, really big bubble in orbit around Saturn. Up to 1 Mm across (though not on the first attempt). Harden the surface, build a couple disecting planes in as “ground” tiers, fill the top half with Hydrogen and de-orbit. Instant real estate; each tier about the size of Turkey or France, more or less. NIAC released a paper on building the bubbles.
I saw an Imperial Death Star at 1:34. Maybe this explains the quake in Japan.
Bart: too soon, dude.
“It makes you realize that as striking they are in appearance, the mass density is very slight, and there’s plenty of open space in there.”
Well, FWIW, the air over Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, was overwhelmingly just air. There was plenty of open space between the bullets.
Oh, and the North Atlantic on 14 April 1912 was mostly just water. There was plenty of open space between the icebergs.
The question is, what’s your mean free path?
BBB
Just think, if they had a heavy lift launch vehicle they could make much bigger pictures like these…
Brock, you’re thinking of Venus.
Trent,
I’m thinking of not just Venus. Venus is 0.91g, while Saturn is 1.06g. Saturn is big, but not very dense after all.
You couldn’t build a 1 Mm sphere to float on Venus though. Too big. The lower half of the bubble would descend down into the way-too-hot zone. I’m not sure what the optimal bubble-size would be for Venus, but it would much closer to Singapore than France.
Venus two primary advantages are its proximity to Earth (for colonist transfer time) and ample sunlight (more than Earth). If the outside of your bubble was solar-collecting you’d have more energy than you could productively put to use.
Brock, do you have a citation or link for your bubble habitat – I’m having a hard time getting my head around it. Is this the NIAC bubble paper you mentioned? http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/fellows/mar07/1314Crowe.pdf
Two SF references: Robert Forward was interested in Saturn’s amenability to human visits. Look at the second-to-last paragraph here:
http://www.robertforward.com/Fast_Forward_Fifty_Years.htm
Charles Stross sets one chapter of Accelerando on a bubbled-over Saturn, but I think the scheme isn’t the same as the one Brock is describing.
Hey Bob-1,
That is the paper I was thinking of. It doesn’t contain the whole idea, just the bubble concept. I don’t have a single source because the idea is mine. I put it together from several inspirations.
I was first introduced to the idea of the Tensegrity sphere some years ago. The idea would allow floating cities on Earth (as long as you heated the air a few degrees, like a hot air balloon).
Then I read about how temperate the conditions are in Venus’ upper atomosphere and thought the Tensegrity Sphere would be a neat thing on Venus. That’s what got my interest in floating colonies. Since the Tensegrity Sphere on Venus would be so very high up in the atosphere you could built them pretty big, maybe 5 km across or more.
Charles Stross’s Accelerando did have a Saturn colony concept, but it was different than what I’m thinking. His colonies weren’t well described, but they seemed more like a floating platform held up by a big bag of helium. Not unlike a dirigible that was the size of New Jersey.
Anyway, when I read the NIAC paper you linked to I thought about Venus colony again and realized that a 1000 km bubble as the paper proposed as possible was far too large for Venus, but would be doable on Saturn. You could tow in an asteroid, melt it down and inflate it with gasses pulled from the Saturn atmospher, or from a passing comet maybe. I also figured with such a large air mass inside you could probably support more than one “level” of habitat, so why not make a few of them with a couple km of “sky” between them?
The one thing I have no engineering on, which might put a kibosh on the entire concept, is whether you could make a bubble hull with sufficient tensile strength to not “pop” once the colony weight was settled inside it under Saturn’s gravity. If there’s no way to do it, then the idea isn’t worth much. The mass would be huge, but spread out across an equally large area.
The reason I like the idea is because of it seems to be fairly easy construction in space with few (or any) on site people. You could never built a 1000 km structure on Saturn with rivets and hardhats. But if you could take an 100 km asteroid with a good mix of ores, melt it down, blow up a bubble of it to 1000 km, harden the shell, and coat the outside with something for tensile strength (like a carbon-nanotube polymer) … it might work.