The data rate from the surface of titan is abysmal. Even with a relay, we won't get much video, but man, I hope we get some.
From a scientific standpoint, there's really no value in downlinking video as opposed to still images. It costs several multiples worth of scarce downlink bandwidth, for a tiny gain in what there is to see of the same rocks at slightly different angles. Same reason we didn't have New Horizons at Pluto or the various Mars rovers do any video.
You could have the facility move constantly to keep the facility straddled across the sunlight line. At the equator, this would require constantly moving at about 7 mph, though you could reduce the speed necessary by moving to higher latitudes.
Appears in 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson.
They move the whole city around the planet at 7mph!! 10/10 would recommend
I love this mission. From a science point of view it’s probably good to send similar and well tested rovers to Mars. But to me it gets boring. I think NASA used to get a lot of fascination from doing the seemingly impossible like flying to the moon. So I think a mission like this will be fascinating for a lot of people. Also it may spawn off a lot of technology. I hope for a submarine mission to Europa.
I think a flying mission is actually superior to a rover as it can cover far more ground and reach some sites that wouldn't be feasible for a rover. And Titan is uniquely suited to using flight to explore as its gravity is a factor 7.25 lower and its atmosphere a factor of 4.4x denser. That means it's about 30 times easier to hover and covering the same distance is at least 7 times as efficient as on Earth, besides h…
I would guess you can't take much instrumentation on a drone so a rover has advantages there. Anyway, I am excited about this.
>To protect the hazy moon, engineers deliberately shoved Cassini into Saturn, a gaseous planet incapable of hosting life. Can we be 100% sure there isn't life.
This is not true. The only reason the previous probe (Huygens) only lasted a few hours is because it was battery powered (and the battery wasn't particularly large). This probe will carry a power source powered by the radioactive decay of Plutonium 238 (virtually all the radiation being alpha particles, which are easily blocked by the casing of the power supply and thus will not hurt the electronics or ground crew) t…
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, before Huygens we expected that the surface might well be entirely liquid, giving us at best only a few minutes to run the experiments and return the data before it sank. There was no point carrying too much battery capacity in that case.
No. Huygens was designed to float and last hours. The battery capacity is why it lasted so short.
I think a flying mission is actually superior to a rover as it can cover far more ground and reach some sites that wouldn't be feasible for a rover. And Titan is uniquely suited to using flight to explore as its gravity is a factor 7.25 lower and its atmosphere a factor of 4.4x denser. That means it's about 30 times easier to hover and covering the same distance is at least 7 times as efficient as on Earth, besides h…
I would guess you can't take much instrumentation on a drone so a rover has advantages there. Anyway, I am excited about this.
Same order of magnitude, actually. Dragonfly is about half the mass of MSL, and because it's so easy to hover, it can have a pretty decent scientific payload. A rover with an arm can more easily approach specific rocks and sample them, though. But Titan is a very mysterious world that we can't get a super good look at from orbit (and which we've barely even glimpsed on the surface), so being able to fly around to many sites is going to be very helpful. Titan has some really interesting and varied geography, too, so the pictures are going to be really cool.
A flying drone is a really solid idea for a Titan lander for a couple reasons: * The surface atmosphere density is higher than Earth's (1.5 atm) * Gravitational force is much lower (0.15g) * We don't know a lot about the surface composition or topography, so wheels and motors represent a challenge * Visibility may be poor, making visual navigation tricky (though that's also a problem for a flying vehicle I suppose) I…
In addition to lack of solar energy, I wonder if nuclear power source is necessary to keep batteries or other electronics warm enough to function properly. Conversely, on Titan, we won't need to worry about heat sinks as everything is kept at ~94K in a bath of liquid and frozen methane. Perhaps in a few hundred years AWS's most popular region for intensive compute will be under Titan's methane sea. High spin up cost,…
Not again...Just had a call from a recruiter asking if I'd be willing to relocate.The comp is fantastic, the job is to maintain AWS server farm.. Had to decline,as my wife doesn't feel like going to Titan..
Mercury's whisper thin atmosphere won't be much use for cooling anything, though possibly the surface would be. However, the real problem is that Mercury isn't actually tidally locked anyway.
You could have the facility move constantly to keep the facility straddled across the sunlight line. At the equator, this would require constantly moving at about 7 mph, though you could reduce the speed necessary by moving to higher latitudes.
Or another scifi novel, West of January by Dave Duncan.
I would guess you can't take much instrumentation on a drone so a rover has advantages there. Anyway, I am excited about this.
Same order of magnitude, actually. Dragonfly is about half the mass of MSL, and because it's so easy to hover, it can have a pretty decent scientific payload. A rover with an arm can more easily approach specific rocks and sample them, though. But Titan is a very mysterious world that we can't get a super good look at from orbit (and which we've barely even glimpsed on the surface), so being able to fly around to man…
Damn! That's a BIG drone. Should have read closer but now I see 450kg. MSL is like a small car.
In addition to lack of solar energy, I wonder if nuclear power source is necessary to keep batteries or other electronics warm enough to function properly. Conversely, on Titan, we won't need to worry about heat sinks as everything is kept at ~94K in a bath of liquid and frozen methane. Perhaps in a few hundred years AWS's most popular region for intensive compute will be under Titan's methane sea. High spin up cost,…
Hah, I was always intrigued by the idea of placing solar cells on the bright side of Mercury and servers on the dark side. I wonder what other good options might exist in the solar system.