----- Original Message ----- From: "Bruce Moomaw" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Europa Icepick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2002 8:15 AM Subject: Re: Icepick
> > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Christlieb, Scott F." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2002 7:01 AM > Subject: Icepick > > > > > > I signed up to receive e-mail that pertained to the Icepick project. So > far, > > all I have received are messages about dismantling Mars using nano > > technology and a couple of other unrelated E-mails. > > > > I'm really interested in the Icepick project and would like to know much > > more. I'm not a scientist and I don't have a ton of college degrees. But I > > do have a great imagination and about 20 years of technology experience. > > > > What work is currently being done? > > How far away are you from making Icepick a > > reality? > > Who are the key players? > > How can I get involved? > _______________ > Give me a few more hours, and I'll track down a very informative list of > Websites for you on these subjects. Well, it took more than a few hours for me to get around to this, but here it is. Unfortunately, the very best detailed document on JPL's current design for a Cryobot isn't yet on the Web: "Cryobot: An Ice Penetrating Robotic Vehicle for Mars and Europa", by Wayne Zimmerman, Robert Bonitz and Jason Feldman -- but it can be found in print in the proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Aerospace Conference. Zimmerman, however, provides a nice capsule summary of the JPL Cryobot's design in his 1999 document "Europa: Extreme Communication Technologies for Extreme Conditions" ( http://techreports.jpl.nasa.gov/1999/99-2051.pdf ); and Frank D. Carsey -- another of JPL's prime reserachers on this subject -- has a good overview of the overall problem in his piece "Exploring Europa's Ocean: A Challenge for Marine technology of This century" ( http://techreports.jpl.nasa.gov/2000/00-0221.pdf ). Be warned, however, that for some reason these last two papers -- along with a few of the others in JPL's Technical Reports file -- are stored in a format which is remarkably hard to print out; don't try to print more than 1 or 2 pages of them at a time or your computer's memory is likely to overload, and be prepared to wait for a while. Also, there's a seminal 1997 JPL Technical Paper on the overall subject of Europa exploration strategy -- "Searching for Ice and Biogenic Activity on Europa and Earth" http://techreports.jpl.nasa.gov/1997/97-0522.pdf ) -- which doesn't have that problem. A very good source for PDF papers on the overall problem of designing Europa exploration missions is JPL's October 2000 workshop on the subject, which can be found at http://sse.jpl.nasa.gov/future/europa/pdfs . For some reason the table of contents for this workshop has been taken off the net. They're all useful, but those by Carsey, Mahaffy, McKinnon, Tamppari and the longer of the two pieces by Zimmerman are likely to be most useful to you. (This workshop dealt more with the overall problem of designing good scientific lander missions, such as picking the best science payload.) Another very good compendium of abstracts on the current scientific theories about Europa, and their relevance to future exploration, is the three Europa Focus Groups run so far by Arizona State University in 2001 and 2002 -- all of them available through the central website at http://astrobiology.asu.edu/focus/europa/discuss/discuss.html COMPLEX (the solar system branch of the National Academy of Sciences' Space Studies Board, which advises NASA on the design of its exploration efforts) has done two very good long reports on the best scientific stragem for Europa exploration: "A Science Strategy for the Exploration of Europa" (1999) -- www.nas.edu/ssb/comp-europamenu.htm "Preventing the Forward Contamination of Europa" (2000) -- www.nas.edu/ssb/europamenu.htm Also, NASA published an excellent 1999 summary of what was known about Europa up to then -- almost all of which is still totally accurate -- at http://centauri.larc.nasa.gov/outerplanets/Europa_SDT.pdf . One of the best very short popular summaries of the subject is "Waterworld" from the 9-18-99 New Scientist ( www.newscientist.com/hottopics/astrobiology/waterworld.jsp ). Australian student James Waldie published his very good undergraduate thesis on "The Existence and Physical Properties of the Europa Ocean" at http://home.vicnet.au/~nbrotar/Europam.htm . (Be warned, however, that I'm biased; I gave him a lot of assistance on source material.) There's an interesting JPL press release on the science results from a 2001 test version of the Cryobot used to explore an Antarctic ice sheet: www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2001/borehole.html , which shows the potential of such vehicles. And NASA's 2001 conference on new techniques for exploring the outer planets includes a description of Honeybee Robotics' proposal for an advanced "Inchworm" cryobot which could not only descend through Europa's ice to the ocean, but then crawl all the way back up to the surface with samples!: www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/outerplanets2001/pdf/4085.pdf The NSF's 1998 Lake Vostok Workshop ( www.ldeo.columbia.edu/vostok/Report.pdf ) is a nice summary of the scientific data on that remarkable lake beneath Antarctica's icecap -- which seems certain to be a testing ground for Europa Cryobot techniques -- and the problems of exploring it. (It's long, though: 7 Mbytes.) Before any cryobot is sent to Europa, a series of simpler landers will have to be sent to explore its surface and near-surface -- including, maybe even onthe first lander, simpler Cryobots that will descend just a few hundred meters through the ice to test the techniques and collect large amounts of material from beneath the shallow upper layer of ice that's been blasted by jupiter's intense radiation to the point that any biochemical evidence of life has probably been destroyed. Just melting that slightly lower ice and analyzing its trace components, however, may provide extremely important biological evidence. Two good pieces on this problem (besides all those papers from the Europa Lander Workshop) are http://techreports.jpl.nasa.gov/1999/99-1552.pdf (no printout problem) and www.seti.org/pdf/Chyba_Europa_Paper_aug17.pdf . And two presentations on a Langley concept for such a shallow Europa Cryobot mission (with penetration of 500 meters) are at http://rasc.larc.nasa.gov/rasc_new/rasc_fy01_top/Europa_Overview.htm http://rasc.larc.nasa.gov/rasc_new/Europa/EUROPA_OCT2_OVERVIEW_92601_97.pdf Finally, it should be pointed out that there have been some very important discoveries about Europa since those very good 1999 scientific summaries I listed above: (1) Galileo's induced magnetic field measurements have now established with near-certainty the present-day Europa DOES have a substantial liquid-water ocean -- and, moreover, that's it's global, and not broken into individual separated bodies of water even thousands of km across. (2) Robert Carlson -- the principal investigator for Galileo's NIMS spectrometer -- is now firmly convinced that the sulfur compound it's detected in Europa's surface ice is mostly not any sulfate salt, but concentrated sulfuric acid manufactured by Jupiter's radiation (out of sulfur sprinkled onto Europa over the eons by Io's volcanoes, he now thinks). If so, Europa's ocean may be extremely acidic -- perhaps with a pH as low as 0 or 1. This, of course, has to be taken into account in any Cryobot design. It doesn't necessarily preclude Europan life -- many species of Eath bacteria have now been found that positively frolic in such super-concentrated H2SO4, even while it eats holes in the researchers' clothes. But such high acidity (assuming Carlson is right and it exists) might well have prevented complex organic compounds from forming into life in the first place. (3) The evidence seems to be growing on several fronts that the "thick crust" model of Robert Pappalardo (in which Europa's current ice layer is as much as 15-20 km thick) is more likely than Richard Greenberg's "thin crust" model in which it's only a few km thick. However, this not only doesn't rule out life; it doesn't rule out the strong chance that a properly desigend Cryobot mision could find large pockets of liquid water with microbial life at much shallower depths in Europa's ice -- maybe within just the top few hundred meters. (4) Chris Chyba has revolutionized theories about Europa biology in the past few years with his theory that Jupiter's deadly raadiation may actually be serving as the central energy source for Europa's life, by manufacturing various nutient chemicals in the top few cm of the ice which are then gradually conveyed by various geological processes all the way down to the ocean, providing a nutrient source vastly richer than any paltry hydrothermal vents on the floor of Europa's ocean. Especially good pieces on this are Chyba's 2001 "Science" article "Life Without Photosynthesis" (available through his website at www.seti.org/science/litu/c-chyba.html , and 4 others at: www.pnas.org.cgi/content/fall/98/3/801 www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2002/pdf/1545.pdf www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2002/pdf/2140.pdf www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2002/pdf/2111.pdf == You are subscribed to the Europa Icepick mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project information and list (un)subscribe info: http://klx.com/europa/
