----- Original Message -----
From: LARRY KLAES
To: europa
Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2002 8:06 AM
Subject: What about a Slam Dunk approach to Icepick? Remember the plans for the CRAF probe over a decade ago
that was going to send a spike-shaped probe into a comet
to penetrate its surface and study the interior of an ancient
iceball?
Would it be possible to design something similar for Icepick?
If we find a relatively thin area of Europa's crust, perhaps
one of the cracks or those upwellings just in the news, we
could literally use a hardened protective cone to smash
through the ice and deposit the Icepick Hydroobot into the
liquid ocean. Or at the least slam it deep into the ice so
we would not have to melt/drill/dig so far?
My hope for this is to reduce the amount of power and
such to get through the ice crust so we can focus more
resources on the Hydrobot. Could the Hydrobot be
designed to survive such an impact?
Well, no matter how fast you ram a penetrator into Europa's ice, it won't
go deeper than a few meters -- and we're talking about a vehicle that has
to melt its way through KILOMETERS of ice. If Richard
Greenberg's theory that there are some water-filled cracks running almost
all the way to the surface is correct, a penetrator Cryobot might be able to
smash down a substantial part of the distance through their ice covering -- but
you'd have to locate such a place very precisely, and the penetrator would have
to be extremely precisely targeted to hit it. (On top of that, the
evidence for Greenberg's model -- as opposed to Pappalardo's
thick-crust model of Europa's ice -- seems to be extremely weak, including the
fact that ice is ductile enough that the pressure even a few km down probably
causes it to flow and seal up any such cracks quickly. The total thickness
of Europa's ice crust may be very uniform from place to place.)
This does prove again that a radar sounder on Europa Orbiter is worthwhile
to try to locate relatively thin spots in the ice, such as Greenberg's cracks
(or even isolated near-surface water pockets, which are far more likely) as
high-value possible landing sites for later Europa missions. But it's a
safe bet that virtually all of a Cryobot's downward progress through the ice
layer must be done by melting.
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- What about a Slam Dunk approach to Icepick? LARRY KLAES
- Re: What about a Slam Dunk approach to Icepick? Joe Latrell
- Re: What about a Slam Dunk approach to Icepick? JHByrne
- Re: What about a Slam Dunk approach to Icepick? Bruce Moomaw
- Re: What about a Slam Dunk approach to Icepick? LARRY KLAES
- Re: What about a Slam Dunk approach to Icepick? TrySide
- Re: What about a Slam Dunk approach to Icepick? Bruce Moomaw