[HN Gopher] NASA's Europa Clipper: Miles Down, Instruments Deplo...
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NASA's Europa Clipper: Miles Down, Instruments Deploying
Author : rbanffy
Score : 147 points
Date : 2024-11-29 23:47 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nasa.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nasa.gov)
| rhcom2 wrote:
| The extension mechanism for the magnetometer looks amazing.
| Godspeed little probe.
| Groxx wrote:
| Holy cow, that 23 second video is _118 megabytes_
| stavros wrote:
| Modern technology truly is amazing.
| qingcharles wrote:
| You made me go back and fullscreen it. It is crispy as hell
| on my 4K!
|
| What a mechanism, though! Totally wild. I would have to have
| tested that 100 times to believe it would actually work.
| fn-mote wrote:
| For once the article is more interesting than the HN discussion.
|
| Note, though, that this is only about engineering. "The science
| comes later." The probe is still months from Mars on its way to
| Jupiter. Wait for 2030.
| rkagerer wrote:
| I wish it went into even more technical depth.
|
| I've also been trying to find documents and movies about the
| Apollo missions that are more about the engineering than the
| people. (Nothing wrong with the latter, just feels like that's
| all the existing, sometimes over-dramatized films are about).
| dylan604 wrote:
| > sometimes over-dramatized films are about)
|
| For a film that's meant for entertaining, this is all you
| well ever see. The drama is what the mass audience can
| understand. The mass audience will not grasp the majority of
| the science/engineering and will get bored.
|
| There are some very science oriented content, but their
| popularity is dwarfed by the dramatic stories of the people.
| It's just like what true hacking in films is mostly just made
| up stuff to look cool rather than just the boring work that
| hacking truly is because nobody will watch it. They might as
| well cut to a YouTube stream of someone live coding.
| mulmen wrote:
| I feel like Hidden Figures did a good job showing the impact
| of innovation and the impact of hard work done on the ground.
| There's drama too but it has a unique perspective. The "this
| has to be calculated correctly or we miss the moon and people
| die" moment was particularly impactful to me
| ted_dunning wrote:
| Sadly many of the situations depicted in the movie were
| entirely fictional.
|
| There were plenty of critical moments and plenty of drama.
| Ironically, for all of the manufactured scenes about
| discrimination and rejiggering of timelines by decades in
| the movie, John Glenn apparently did ask for Johnson to
| check some calculations ... he just didn't do it during
| final launch prep.
|
| The wikipedia page on the topic has a great list of "things
| that didn't happen that way" in the movie:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures#Historical_acc
| u...
| jessriedel wrote:
| Scott Manley has some good videos focusing on various
| engineering aspects of Apollo: https://www.youtube.com/result
| s?search_query=apollo+scott+ma...
|
| You could do worse than just reading all the Wikipedia
| articles on all the various pieces of hardware, e.g., the
| Lunar Landing Research Vehicle
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle
| ranger207 wrote:
| Haynes, who is more well known for car repair manuals, puts
| out a surprisingly good set of "owner's manuals" that are
| highly technical. I loved the "Apollo 13 Owners' Workshop
| Manual" since it went into exacting detail about how each
| part of the spacecraft, including wiring diagrams and
| plumbing charts. Their Saturn V manual was also very good
| imemyself wrote:
| I also find the "people" stories somewhat less interesting
| than technical. I really enjoyed the "How Apollo Flew to
| Moon" book. I also have "Stages to Saturn" on my list to read
| sometime, sounded interesting but haven't read it yet.
| PaulGaspardo wrote:
| Maybe you're aware but NASA publishes lots of technical and
| scientific documents to https://ntrs.nasa.gov/
|
| Like this technical memo about Apollo data network systems
| from 1966: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19670009662
|
| JPL specifically has its own repository with similar content
| at https://dataverse.jpl.nasa.gov/dataverse/jor
|
| Like this paper about file transfers with the Europa Clipper
| spacecraft: https://dataverse.jpl.nasa.gov/file.xhtml?fileId=
| 72593&versi...
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| The engineering-focused "Omega Tau" podcast had some some
| good episodes on the Apollo program:
|
| http://omegataupodcast.net/83-how-apollo-flew-to-the-moon/
|
| http://omegataupodcast.net/97-how-apollo-explored-the-moon/
| t1234s wrote:
| Will starship make any difference in the speed of these probes or
| will it just allow much heavier probes to be launched?
| tekla wrote:
| A little, but mostly insignificant. The real practical benefit
| is that if Starship succeeds to be as reusable and rapidly
| launchable as claimed, its easier to line up launches with
| gravity assist windows as needed, and thats where you get the
| huge velocity increases
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Yes and yes. Starship offers about twice the delta-v and triple
| the mass capacity as Falcon Heavy. Capitalising on the former
| for a deep-space mission, however, would require sacrificing
| some reusable.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Given its relatively low cost, it would be entirely possible
| to use a non-reentry starship as a bus for an interplanetary
| probe with extra fuel capacity. They'd just have to strip
| down their lunar starship and possibly add segments for
| larger tankage.
| jccooper wrote:
| Starship itself will not be a great deep space delivery
| vehicle, in the same way current disposable second stages are
| used. Too big and too... reusable.
|
| However, it'll make a great delivery system for some serious
| high-energy escape velocity "third" stages, rather like the
| Shuttle "Inertial Upper Stage" that delivered Magellan and
| Galileo and Ulysses.
| Laremere wrote:
| Well, Starship is specifically designed to make it to Mars if
| refueled in LEO. So it could deliver monstrously large Mars
| rovers. If they're going for the outer planets, they could do
| as you suggest after the first burn using a refueled
| Starship. Either way you're sacrificing a Starship second
| stage (old, or better yet reduced mass version) to the gods
| of delta V.
| jessriedel wrote:
| A re-fueled Starship will be able to deliver ~100 tons to the
| surface of Mars, to be compared with the heaviest existing
| rover that was slightly over 1 ton. Yes, it will take ~10
| Starship flights to fully refuel one Mars-bound Starship, but
| the fully reusable design is supposed to ensure this can be
| done for relative cheap.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| The vision I have for NASA missions is to avoid these tiny one
| off probes and use starship to lift multiple boosters to orbit,
| assemble a server rack and multiple imagers, a radio thermal
| power source, and boost it to orbit around each outer planet
| (except perhaps Jupiter, too much radiation).
|
| It's just not the right business model to build "small" probes
| like this that trickle back imagery when we can be downloading
| the same imagery AND querying data that's sitting in situ to
| run analysis on a planet -local server of TB of real time
| signals.
|
| Imagine you see something interesting in one image, and just
| ask the server to find local similar things all over the planet
| from the imagery in storage. Instant frequency and geospatial
| analysis product without begging for observation time or
| (worse) a new mission.
|
| Oh and a kilometer scale telescope in orbit.
| Teever wrote:
| I think that there will always be a desire for small probes,
| but you're right that one-offs aren't economical.
|
| The advantages of Starship is that with such a massive
| payload capacity it can carry many small probes and combined
| with a low cost per kg it will justify setting up assembly
| lines that churn out small probes by the thousands.
|
| We'll pepper the solar system with these probes and they'll
| act as nodes in a large interplanetary network relaying data
| between each other and larger, more powerful nodes as you
| describe.
|
| The nodes in a network are important and more powerful nodes
| are more desirable, but the network itself is a powerful
| thing that it greater than the sum of its parts.
|
| This combined with economies of scale will always justify
| more smaller satellites.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| With economics, I think we have to be careful when
| questioning the financial efficiency of organisations like
| NASA, Universities, research, and the like. Some of these
| things _should_ be societal cost centers.
|
| The question for me therefore, based on your comment, is
| whether Europa Clipper's expense can be justified because
| it is funding the current generation of custom space
| vehicle and mission experts, keeping alive their traditions
| and skills for the next generation.
|
| The alternative view is that it's a waste of money to
| continuously support the careers of what are possibly the
| spaceship equivalents of wheelwrights, stable masters, and
| saddlers.
| Teever wrote:
| I believe that it absolutely can be justified for
| precisely the reason you state -- it keeps the experts
| trained so that they can as a minimum produce things like
| Europa Clipper. But to me that's just keeping their
| expertise and the potential that it offers on life
| support.
|
| Having the technology and infrastructure to produce the
| things that they are experts at producing but in an
| unprecedented scale is what we need if we want them to
| reach their full potential.
|
| It allows them to more rapidly iterate over design ideas
| by seeing what works and what doesn't. It also allows
| cheaper destructive testing to work out the bugs instead
| of waiting a decade to find out if they just wasted
| billions of dollars and centuries of man years with
| intrinsically flawed designs.
|
| And ultimately it allows us to build modular self-
| assembling spacecraft on a scale that we've only dreamed
| of allowing them to practice their trades in new ways
| that will unlock new science and knowledge for the human
| race.
| pixl97 wrote:
| With cheap and commonly launched rockets like starship
| we'll also be able to launch many more cheap test
| platforms that won't need billion dollar budgets. Take
| the antenna on this thing, they get one chance to deply
| it correctly. But now imagine launching a test antenna
| project where for a few million you can make sure they
| work before you put them on a more expensive probe.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Well, sure, but how does "peppering the solar system" with
| 100 probes at a time work when each insertion is wildly
| different? Lifting 100 probes is great, but only if they
| are going on same / similar boosts to their targets.
|
| And how does it get the initial boost along its trajectory?
| We could do solar electric and wait a year for it to pick
| up enough delta-v to _start_ the journey ...
|
| Fully disclosing my ignorance here: How does it work to
| launch 100 probes to 10 planets from earth with one launch?
| Teever wrote:
| I'm not sure about that specifically, I've only taken an
| intro to orbital mechanics class so esoteric orbital
| maneuvers are a bit beyond me but I understand that in
| some cases it is possible. I would imagine that one
| technique that we have yet to try is putting fuel depots
| in long distance places to facilitate the execution of
| these manuevers.
|
| With that said what I had in mind when I wrote my comment
| wasn't using one rocket to launch a 100 probes to
| different solar bodies but instead to launch 100 probes
| to a single body in one go. I envision a time where we'll
| deploy massive constellations of remote sensing
| satellites, like mini-star link constellations for each
| solar body be it a moon or planet so that we can get
| real-time data across the whole body instead of having to
| stitch together pieces of data from one probe. Like
| Starlink these constellations will be able to relay data
| between the nodes should they lose line of sight with
| Earth and will be able to relay data to other
| constellations orbiting other nearby solar bodies to get
| the data to Earth if the whole constellation is
| blocked.[0]
|
| I could see a near future where we start sending these
| Starlink like communications/remote sensing craft at the
| same time we send craft designed to pepper the surface of
| a body with multiple rovers and stationary probes to
| survey the surface of planets and again relay the data
| they collect between themselves and the constellations
| above.
|
| It would be cool to see terrestrial bodies explored with
| some sort of RTG/solar powered stationary device that has
| an automated lab for sample analysis and seismic
| measurements paired with a dozen or so of these sandflea
| type robots[0] that can roll and hop over the surface to
| survey and collect samples to bring back to the
| stationary labs for analysis.
|
| You can even look at sample return missions where some of
| these stationary devices have the means to send samples
| into orbit around the solar body that they're located on
| where the sample carrying craft rendevous with an
| orbiting craft designed to return to Earth perhaps
| refueling with fuel depots previously put in place along
| the way.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTmYm3gMYOQ
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b4ZZQkcNEo
| jvanderbot wrote:
| This is a much better plan. One issue with 100 probes
| around, say, Enceladus, is the downlink bandwidth. This
| is why I suspect on site infra is going to be required.
|
| But honestly let's do both. Infra and something like
| Planet Labs for outer planets. We can.
| Teever wrote:
| There will absolutely be a place for super nodes in the
| kind of networks that are going to be built out.
|
| Their performance will likely be somewhat limited
| compared to what you're looking for at this point due to
| radiation and the excessive mass of the shielding
| required to protect them from it.
|
| That can be mitigated with in situ resource production.
| Like burying a server rack scale processing node under
| ground on mars and relaying data to it with the network I
| described above or capturing water from comets and using
| it fill compartments for radiation shielding in orbital
| data centers.
| mturmon wrote:
| Related to your question, but not responsive to the "speed"
| aspect: Here is a nice article from Ars [1] on the impact of
| starship on large space telescopes. This is focused on Webb
| successors (which in NASA fall under astrophysics, not
| planetary, like Clipper) not "planetary probes" per se,
| although a linked and more technical article [2] touches
| briefly on that.
|
| One coauthor of [2] is the chief scientist for astrophysics at
| JPL, so it's not just idle speculation.
|
| The ability to launch an 8m telescope definitely has space
| mission designers interested. However, probe velocity itself is
| not addressed.
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/astronomers-say-new-
| te...
|
| [2]
| https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/76/2/40/2869438/Ac...
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Starship lets you trade money and mission complexity for time.
| A fully refueled Starship in LEO should have around 5km/s in an
| expendable configuration. A gravity assist from Earth or Mars
| typically provides 2-5km/s. Looking at the
| https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of...
| 5km/s from LEO is barely enough to reach Jupiter. Looking at
| the mission trajectory direct launch would shave off roughly 2
| years from 5 year mission -
| https://europa.nasa.gov/mission/timeline/
|
| You could also launch much-much heavier probe with a dedicated
| boost stage and / or electric propulsion...
| ANewFormation wrote:
| The largest probe ever launched afaik is Voyager 1, and it
| was less than a ton. Even 'massive' things like the James
| Webb telescope only weighs 7 tons.
|
| Starship is aiming for being able to launch 200+ tons. So
| stuff like this on a dedicated mission would have vastly more
| delta-v available but also be kind of silly. There's no
| reason we couldn't scale things up and just launch hundreds
| of probes at once all through the Solar System. Alternatively
| instead of launching probes we could look to start launching
| modular observation stations that could one day even house
| humans, or perhaps even grander ideas.
|
| Launching one off probes, rovers, and satellites is really
| something I think we should be aiming to move beyond, let
| alone on the ridiculous time intervals we operate on at
| present.
|
| We shouldn't still be making basic, yet revolutionary,
| discoveries on the Moon, more than half a century after we
| set foot on it.
| baq wrote:
| Comms is the reason. DSN dish time is not a particularly
| abundant resource even today.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The far side of the moon is prime real estate for
| radiotelescopes. You can create a sizable expansion of
| the DSN by sharing dish time with the antennas you can
| build from local materials.
| philistine wrote:
| Well I fully assume that the DSN itself will move to
| space, courtesy of Starship's large tonnage to orbit.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I've been thinking for years we should built a space
| network of probe and satellite like objects - imagine if
| we landed a small relay on every asteroid passing
| anywhere near earth - could be highly useful for
| communication and possibly also give us a GPS like
| location assist for additional spacecraft
| AlessandroF6587 wrote:
| Starship can be used to release a probe with gigantic fuel
| reserve and a bigger than usual energy source (solar or
| nuclear). Then the probe can use a VASMIR or other electric
| propulsion to gradually accumulate a vast amount of delta-v
| sandworm101 wrote:
| A fully refueled starship in leo is a big _big_ ask, akin to
| getting a full shuttle stack into orbit. On-orbit refueling
| at such a scale has not been done yet and is difficult to
| even think about doing. It isnt like KSP. The more efficient
| route would be to scrap starship and design a high-energy
| upper stage to be launched by the BFR instead, a purpose-
| built probe thrower. Starship is way to heavy to be a
| practical final stage for probes.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| On-orbit refuelling at such a scale does sound rather
| difficult, but they also fully intend to do it in the near
| future. They're certainly going to give it a good try.
|
| Also, if you don't want to make an entirely different
| second stage to put on top of superheavy, you should be
| able to fit a pretty substantial third stage in Starship's
| payload bay.
|
| Right now the payload bay doesn't open anywhere near enough
| for that, but hopefully in the future that'll be an option.
|
| And if you really want to make something go fast, you could
| refuel in orbit, give it a push from Starship, then deploy
| the third stage for another kick.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Right now the payload bay doesn't open anywhere near
| enough for that
|
| Shouldn't be too hard to design a starship with a blunt
| nose and place it under an expendable fairing.
|
| With a 1-ton probe the budget is 99 tons for a kick
| stage. That's a lot of delta-v. With some creative
| propulsion options, maybe even interstellar probes can be
| done.
| sneak wrote:
| Everything you said is right, but on-orbit refueling is of
| course theoretically possible, and isn't THAT huge of a
| leap given what SpaceX has already accomplished. Let's not
| forget the space lasers, or the chopstick catch, or
| Starlink-live-streamed 4K views from the plasma shadow
| during reentry, or autonomous Dragon docking, etc.
|
| Sure, it's hard, but that is perhaps the best engineering
| team in the history of humankind, and I think they're up to
| the task.
|
| Additionally, people much smarter than me ALSO think they
| are up to the task, and they have more and higher-
| resolution data about the problem space, too.
|
| My money's on they get it working. Maybe it takes five
| years or a dozen failures, but I'm confident that they will
| succeed eventually and there will be orbiting methane and
| lox fuel stations sooner rather than later.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Those things were never seen as impossible, just
| difficult. Nobody has even a theoretical concept of how
| to move tons of liquid oxygen between rockets in orbit.
| And there is some talk of banning it as too dangerous.
| Remember all those pad explosions related to fuel issues?
| We cannot risk that much space debris as spaceX goes
| through a learning process.
| kolinko wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, SpaceX is already contracted by NASA
| to do on orbit refuelling, and one of the recent
| starships did initial trials of fuel transmission
| (internal for now).
|
| Update: - source article - $58M contract to do that -
| https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starship-nasa-contract-
| orbi...
|
| - chatgpt confirmation + links to more sources - https://
| chatgpt.com/share/e/674b5c1b-d318-8004-b79d-c0eefc59...
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" A fully refueled Starship in LEO should have around
| 5km/s in an expendable configuration."_
|
| That can't be right; a naive application of the rocket
| equation gives (3.72 km/s) * ln(1,300 mT / 100 mT) = 9.55
| km/s.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| It's definitely higher than 5km/s, but I would not go up to
| 9.5km/s. My napkin math was - booster provides 2km/s and
| the LEO is 7.2km/s, so if the ship arrives nearly empty LEO
| it must provide a minimum 5.2km/s. I did not account for
| gravity + friction losses which could be guesstimated to
| 2km/s. If we assume that ship handles all of them (which is
| not true booster does some) we come up to 5 + 2 = 7.2km/s.
|
| The equation you have uses block 1 prop + dry mass numbers.
| Block 1 does not have significant payload capability and
| the last one just flow on OFT 6. As such let's use Block 2
| numbers, first one should fly early next year. Dry mass
| target 100t, payload 100t, prop mass 1,500t. So (3.72 km/s)
| * ln(1700 / 200) = 7.96 km /s. This is with using min
| advertised payload of 100t and Elon's forward looking 100t
| number for dry mass. Way above 5km/s, but reaching 9.5km/s
| with 100t of payload will be challenging.
|
| I've pulled stats from
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship .
| perihelions wrote:
| You're mixing up unrelated concepts. In particular, the
| payload capacity to LEO of 100 tonnes has nothing to do
| with this calculation.
|
| _Europa Clipper_ isn 't a 100 tonne payload; it's about
| 6.
| creer wrote:
| Speed is not necessarily the correct lever it might affect. A
| probe with much larger antenna, with much larger or multiple
| radioactive power sources, with much more solar panels, with
| much more onboard fuel, etc could be much more useful with the
| same speed.
| ragebol wrote:
| More mass means more fuel means more speed?
| ben_w wrote:
| More fuel may mean longer duration missions rather than
| getting to the destination faster.
|
| Or the same duration mission with a more massive payload
| that can both do more and report more.
| sph wrote:
| _> On March 1, 2025, Europa Clipper will reach Mars' orbit and
| begin to loop around the Red Planet, using the planet's gravity
| to gain speed. [...]
|
| > At Mars, scientists plan to turn on the spacecraft's thermal
| imager to capture multicolored images of Mars as a test
| operation._
|
| The positive thing about space being so large is that the further
| we go, the more of the neighbourhood we visit to take pictures of
| (as we need their gravitational assistance in our travels)
| Agraillo wrote:
| Nice engineering achievement. According to Wikipedia the biggest
| NASA interplanetary vehicle to date is powered by 600W solar
| panels. Will your personal gaming PC work with 600W power supply
| or is it doomed to "de-orbit"?
| braden-lk wrote:
| So cool! I worked on this project during my internship at JPL.
| I'm sure they hucked all my code in the trash as soon as I left,
| but it was a fun summer. :)
| euroderf wrote:
| Quick question: Does JPL use PowerPoint a lot ?
| standardUser wrote:
| I was just browsing these Wikipedia pages to get an idea of the
| extent of interplanetary exploration:
|
| List of Solar System Probes:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_probes
|
| Exploration of the Solar System:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_and_exploration_of_t...
|
| The Russian space program, despite having many firsts and many
| successes, had a huge number of failures early on with
| interplanetary probes and fell off almost completely by the
| mid-70's. Meanwhile Europe and Japan, both often viewed as
| lackluster space powers due to their lack of manned space
| programs, have contributed massively to solar system exploration.
| Melatonic wrote:
| They did land a probe on Venus however!
| euroderf wrote:
| > already 13 million miles (20 million kilometers) from Earth.
|
| Please, just call it a "light-minute", and remind ppl that the
| moon is one and a quarter light-seconds away.
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