----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary McMurtry" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2001 1:20 PM
Subject: Re: How to combine the Europa Orbiter and Lander
>
> Bruce, et al.,
>
> My sincere belief is if we can get the "powers that be" in NASA and
> JPL to place a viable lander on the Europa orbiter mission, the
> "combo mission", then we can all rest assured that we have made a
> significant contribution to the expedition of science.
>
> Toward that goal, I'm getting involved with some planetary scientists
> in proofing the concept of a projectile-like probe that can use
> gravity to burrow into the planet's "soil" or ice/salt crust. Yep,
> you guessed it, I'm doing the mass spectrometer development. Now, as
> a marine geologist (dusting off an old hat), we have this device
> called a free-fall corer. It is a perfect sampling tool when you are
> not too sure of the exact target or terrain. One launches several
> off the fantail of a ship into the areas of interest, and you can rig
> them for various sediment depths. Also, since you have many, a few
> loses are not mission-killers. I'll tell you more details of this
> planetary sampler project when I'm authorized to do so.
I think what you're talking about is, simply, penetrators -- which have been
routinely discussed as a way of exploring Europa (and most other worlds) for
decades. The only two attempts to use them for that purpose so far -- the
U.S. micro-penetrators on Deep Space 2 and the larger Russian ones on Mars
96 -- both failed, but Japan will make the next attempt in 2003 with large
ones on Lunar-A, and at some point the technology is bound to work (since
it's worked routinely on Earth for decades).
A multiple Europa penetrator mission has its definite positive points, and
in fact the Europa Icepick website (including me) has very often discussed
them in the past -- namely, the facts that they're light enough that you
could land several of them on different promising sites during one mission,
and that they bury themselves deeply enough in the ice to get largely below
the radiation-scrambled top layer without having to drill. What we really
need is a penetrator that doubles as a Cryobot -- that is, that can then
melt its way a modest distance further down into the ice. Since this
doesn't need to be done in any precisely direction-controlled way -- or for
any great depth -- on this initial mission, maybe the steel tips on the
penetrators could themselves be stuffed with enough Pu-238 that each
penetrator would continue slowly melting its way downward after its initial
impact?
==
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