Europa could be a challenging place to land.
It seems to me that you just have to budget some extra propellant for a hover to melt it, then drop in with a floating ship. Too bad there’s no ice in the rings, or you could mine some propellant from them. But you could fuel up in the Belt before heading on to Jupiter.
ALL THESE WORLDS
ARE YOURS EXCEPT
EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO
LANDING THERE
USE THEM TOGETHER
USE THEM IN PEACE
Yes, Glenn beat you to that.
ALL THESE WORLDS
ARE YOURS EXCEPT
EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO
LANDING THERE
USE THEM TOGETHER
USE THEM IN PEACE
BURMA SHAVE
Or do like ice climbers do and equip the lander with claws and ice picks to latch onto the side of slope.
There’s a whole lot of low-gravity moons of Jupiter both within and without the four main ones, that should be easy enough to mine ice from. You could do a “Grand Tour” of the whole system, topping up at each object.
In that radiation environment?!?! No, thanks.
Drop a 500lb bomb and clear the LZ
Military figured this one out years ago!
Wouldn’t it be easier to have the lander do an orbit first and look for existing craters/flat-ish spots?
Apparently only a problem if you insist on landing within 20 degrees of the equator.
I thought it said thirty degrees.
“This in turn allowed them to calculate that penitentes are probably restricted to between 15 and 20 degrees latitude from the equator.”
Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves discussing a lander? Wouldn’t it make more sense to put an orbiter with a high-resolution mapper and ground-penetrating radar around Europa first?
Too pantywaisted. I say we bore right in for the landing and damn the consequences.
No, I’m not being sarcastic.
A bigger issue than the landing is that such features would make surface exploration difficult, if not virtually impossible.
So skip surface exploration, it’s ice. Include a submarine.
“A major US conference has heard the moon may have ideal conditions for icy spikes called “penitentes” to form.”
‘May have ideal conditions’ implies to me that none of this has actually been observed.
Michael Kent is right. Take a look before moaning “Woe is me.”
The article seems to be confused about the motion of planetary bodies and moons:
“Europa is very strongly tidally locked to Jupiter and Jupiter is very strongly tidally locked to the plane of the Sun. ,So the Sun is always coming down straight from above on Europa,” said Dr Hobley, so the moon fulfils this requirement nicely.
Uh-huh. Not quite.
So that’s where superman put his fortress of solitude!
If we know the conditions we can mitigate them. Rand’s solution seems right to me.
Faster might be to drop a nuke first.
Or just crash the booster stage, a la the lunar S-IVB.
Depending on how much energy is required.
A booster stage can have quite a bit of energy. For example, Europa has an orbital speed of about 13.7 km/s around Jupiter and an escape velocity of 2 km/s. A booster coming in on a retrograde orbit is going to hit with about 29 km/s of velocity (double the orbital speed plus escape velocity). That means every 10 kg of the booster’s mass has upon impact the energy content of a metric ton of TNT. So a ten ton booster in such an orbit would hit with the energy equivalent of one kiloton. That should be sufficient to clear a landing spot.