Uranus should be NASA’s top planetary target – report
science.org
science.org
Each has only been visited once and that was over 30 years ago with the Voyager missions. We learned a lot but now we have way better tech, way better cameras and can learn way more.
It takes a particular planetary alignment to make such a trip possible. The next such window is in the early 2030s. These outer Solar System missions are really expensive and take a long prep time so that window to prep a mission in time is rapidly closing. And that's to get there around 2040.
People don't realize just how hard it is to reach these outer planets. New Horizons was a flyby on Pluto because an intercept mission was essentially impossible. Crossing such a large distance to a slow-moving planet means a massive delta-V budget (which is impractical or impossible) or it takes so long you risk instrument or mission failure.
At least Uranus and Neptune have a much larger gravity well and have higher orbital speeds so gravitional capture is much more practical.
We won't see both visited in the next window but I'd settle for at least one.
But that's not really relevant for reaching Uranus. That requires a more common alignment, which is with Jupiter. Jupiter orbits every ~12 years. Uranus orbits every 84 years. Jupiter is the vast bulk of mass in the Solar System that isn't the Sun, which is why it's such a good slingshot. So there's a window every ~12 years.
If we miss the early 2030s window, we'll be waiting to at least the mid 2040s.
SpaceX probes Uranus!
So I really think it's time to focus on "get there quickly" to make missions cheaper. Design a relatively simple vessel weighing around 40t or so with enormous ISP (electrical or chemical, whatever fits the bill) and then use it twice per year or even more often to send more or less standardized probes to whatever target you find interesting.
I am well aware that this concept sketch trivializes many aspects of space missions: Communication, power, navigation to name just a few aspects. But I still think that oversizing and then using the same design often would be much cheaper in the long run.
Honestly kind of unsure why we're not hearing more about this already. The costs of it are an increasingly small fraction of what we're spending on these probes anyhow.
Getting above the atmosphere is a big win, and may well make it worth it to do the final fueling from orbit. But in the end, getting to orbit may be as little as 100 miles of a multi-billion-mile trip.
The whole reason I'm interested is obviously not that lifting fuel a vanishing fraction percent of the distance is helpful. The whole reason is that with a full fuel tank that's already in orbit, a probe ought to be able to take off straight for a planet without having to wait for an energy-impoverished orbit to be available. Or take off on a much more energy-intensive orbit that involves more aggressive slingshot maneuvers, or whatever else; having more energy doesn't preclude using that energy cleverly as well.
I also find myself curious about what we could do with an ion drive... or set of ion drives... fed with lots of fuel. And maybe an RTG for power, or some other real power source other than solar (which isn't much of a source out there in the gas giants). Or fed by solar cells, but first it takes a swing around the Sun for the almost sole purpose of gathering solar energy and driving the ion drives with it. All sorts of interesting things become possible if we can just use multiple lauches.
New Horizons launched on an Atlas V 551. Falcon Heavy has a larger payload capacity so it might be more possible.
But if you're relying on an engine to decelerate more than gravity then that creates another problem: whgat engine do you use? Remember it has to probably survive in space for possibly 10+ years and fire successfully. The Apollo lander used a super-simple engine for this reason, so much so that it could only ever be fired once (to launch back into Moon orbit) so it couldn't even be test-fired [1].
So what you'd put on a deep space probe is a significant unsolved problem.
[1]: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/36226/why-could-th...
This is still an order of magnitude more than previous deep space probes (Voyager, New Horizons), but still not huge. It is still significantly smaller than something like our current geostationary communications satellites.
Whenever I start feeling down about everything good being done, I like to think about how much we just don’t know. It’s amazing to me that we have these planets nearby and know almost nothing about them. Also the deep sea, etc. we still have a lot to explore.
The best news was that, using an extra kick stage, either SLS or SpaceX Falcon Heavy could launch 3800kg direct to Neptune for a 16 year cruise, meaning they would not be dependent on gravity assists from Jupiter, which would be out of position if the mission schedule slips.
https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2022-brenda-clyde-...
(Some other links, including pdf studies, are linked from the page above)
Wow, that is a damn sight more than an 825kg Voyager or 480 kg New Horizons.
3.8 tons is piddly. Why not launch a 100-ton probe?
Can someone help me understand the desire to put a DNA sequencer on the Enceladus mission? I haven't previously read anything that suggests DNA as being so fundamental to life that it's a safe assumption exotic moon microbes have it. In fact, discovering that exotic moon microbes have DNA exactly like Earth life would seem like the biggest discovery humanity has yet made.
What am I missing?
The benefit of DNA is it's conclusive: if we find DNA, then life (or an exceptionally bizarre natural process) must be their, and if we grab a sequence then it's high probability we'll be able to figure out what type of life it is due to some Earth-local proteins being basically limited in improvement by physics itself, and heavily conserved - i.e. even totally alien life would be expected to manufacture a close analogue.
Not to mention that if we turn up something totally weird, we can still synthesize it up in a lab to study.
In 50 years:
The lack of evidence of other languages in use besides JavaScript suggests that at the very least, once JavaScript happens it outcompetes everything else...
I'm just saying it doesn't follow. DNA could be an "average" encoding mechanism or even a poor one. We don't know since we have no other good examples other than contrived lab creations that can't be tested in a real evolutionary scenario since we don't live for millions of years.
DNA could have outcompeted because some lineage of DNA-based organisms acquired an adaptation that led to them outcompeting everything else, even if other encoding mechanisms were superior.
And if we did find DNA (itself a monumental discovery), sequencing it would be the next most important bit of information we could want, since it might allow us to check if there is some relation to life on earth.
Is this a combo of a) the cost of the second question (i.e. the weight and size of sending the DNA sequencer) is fairly small, b) we're confident enough about question one that putting resources toward question two is worth the opportunity cost of asking a different question, or c) we have no other questions that we can reasonably ask for the same amount of resources?
Unless they find the place teeming with life, which nobody expects, it's more likely that anything they find hitched a ride from Earth instead of originated on the planet. So if they're not willing to rule that possibility out, they'll just end up causing decades of speculation and conspiracy theories.
I think asking the question is fine, especially if you aren’t these things. Further, you don’t have to be either of those to understand a subject. Kind of silly to assume a biologist would have better insight to your question anyway, most biologists aren’t going to specialize in that area.
Can we do something much more grand and hope to see something, unlikely within our lifetime a full possibility? What great wonders of joy if this happens!
Oumuamua was such a remarkable event. Let's plan and have ready to launch and land on another Oumuamua-like visit. We just need to have it ready so that we can launch and land. It can then surf along a magical ride.
We should have ready also a relay system of nodes in space. This way it can readily relay back to the previous node(s) without it getting too far away from us.
Who is onboard this plan or, or possibly could one already be in process?!! I am happy to contribute a draft writeup.
This is like really really hard. Oumuamua was traveling through our solar system at about 87.3 km/s (relative to the sun, I think based on the link below). Earth travels around the sun at about 29.7 km/s. So if Oumuamua and Earth are traveling in the same plane (the is a REALLY BIG IF) then we still need to make up 57.5 km/s of delta V from a rocket. The fastest object we have ever launched from Earth was New Horizons which was launched with an escape velocity of 15.26 km/s and this was, generally speaking, a very light spacecraft launched on a very powerful rocket.
Now even with our more powerful rockets now, overcoming that difference in delta V is still incredibly difficult. To put it another way, in order to land something on the asteroid we already have to get it moving as fast as the asteroid. A more plausible mission would be doing something like Deep Impact that can still get an idea of what is going on in the composition of the comet. There was the "impactor" spacecraft that was launched from the main spacecraft and successfully collided with the comet. But it is less like we hit the comet with something and better to think about it as we got something in the way of the comet's path and the comet smashed in to it. As you might imagine getting something to survive this impact would also be incredibly difficult.
Okay, so let's say we can't overcome this delta V. This would be perspective from having a good relative speed to do a nice, graceful landing.
How about blowing (again no pun intended) right into it? Maybe some projectile form and it can stick to it without blowing the payload into pieces, a different challenge. Imagine either shooting a stick of gum with some payload at the car, or have the car run right into it. If you can't beat'em, join 'em :). I would call this project mosquito, except it doesn't get splat.
I see there is good production value in knowing more about the asteroid composition. What get's me excited is reaching far out into space we might not have thought of possible within our lifetime. Maybe attach a beacon along with it and who know's, maybe something else discovers it and it points right back at us.
Any thoughts to this?
There would still be some serious engineering to have some sort of meaningful electronics (even just a comm beacon with a heartbeat) to survive that impact. A closer analogy might be trying to stick a piece of gum to a supersonic aircraft.
Lets take the Deep Impact as a reference starting point. From the mission data info on Wikipedia [0] the impactor collided with the comet at a relative speed of 10.3 km/s (23,000 mph) and the impact energy was estimated to be the equivalent of 4.7 tons of TNT. Getting something to just straight survive the impact is going to have to be really really tough.
The other option that I am just spitballing (many puns intended) is to get something that would hook the asteroid attached to the payload at the end of a very very long spool.
Step 1: you get the hook in to the asteroid/comet. This has its own challenges. The surface of asteroids and comets is often just very fine dust and small rocks (regolith) attached to the asteroid by it's own small gravity. So perhaps a gigantic net would be better, but again it still needs to be strong enough to survive that initial impact.
Step 2: Attached to the net/hook is a very very very long (like probably hundreds of kilometers long) spool of a very high tension wire that you start spooling out. Again this has to spool out at the relative velocity between the two objects. So something very low friction and probably some sort of active cooling radiator in order to take away the heat. There are missiles that spool out wire behind them to the thing that fired for guidance, i'm envisioning something like that but even crazier.
Step 3: The velocity of the spool starts gradually slowing due to the friction and the relative velocity between the asteroid and the probe. And eventually the probe is being pulled along behind the asteroid. You probably also need some sort of independent thrust and control system on the probe to prevent it from flying around wildly behind the asteroid or possibly smacking in to it again as the spool whips you around.
Step 4: Realize that for all of this effort you are only really traveling about 3-4 times faster than something like New Horizons and its still going to take you 4000 years to reach Proxima Centauri (the nearest star to the Sun) assuming you are pointed in the right direction.
The best shot we have at actually reaching another star system with current (or close to current) technology is something like Breakthrough Starshot. A tiny tiny satellite with a huge solar sail being continually propelled by a system of 100 GW lasers on the ground. The early concepts estimate that it could get to Proxima Centauri in ~30 years. But we've still got a lot of technical obstacles to overcome for this one.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_(spacecraft)#Missi...
We'd have to launch from the moon though.
Uranus is NASA's target! And there's going to be a "4.2 billion flagship mission to the ice giant"!!
chortle, chortle...
"Uranus has not been explored up close"
"After decades in the shadow of the other planets, Uranus should become NASA’s focus of exploration"
"NASA ... will launch a $4.2 billion orbiter and atmospheric probe to Uranus"
"It was Uranus’s turn."
"Uranus also holds its own individual appeal."
"It has two sets of rings, along with a densely packed set of primordial moons and oddball objects, likely trapped comets or objects from a region beyond Neptune"
"flights through those plumes revealed abundant organic molecules, necessary to build life, along with silica and hydrogen gas, a sign that the ocean feeding the plumes probably has hydrothermal vents in its depths"
sigh....
The comedic potential is worth a hell of a lot of publicity and public interest.
People take rovers driving around mars for granted these days. It took 20yr of driving a few feet a day and accompanying monthly press releases about interesting rocks disseminated to the scientific community and then trickled down to the public. Rovers driving around mars is firmly in the status quo. When one runs out of things to do we send another. We don't stop and debate about if it's worth it.
Enough memes about probing Uranus and outer planetary missions will become normalized in the public consciousness. That changes the dichotomy from "if we send a mission to <outer planet>" to "this time the mission will be to <outer planet>".
1: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/fact...
We should do more stuff like that.
For reference, this is how to pronounce it: https://forvo.com/word/%CE%BF%CF%85%CF%81%CE%B1%CE%BD%CF%8C%...
But to me, the mission I most want to see, far beyond any other, would be into a lunar lava tube skylight. It probably would need to have stork legs, and move mostly by hopping.
https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-report-fin...
Yes, lower launch costs have enabled a lot of missions and cheaper spacecraft than would have been possible otherwise. But space is still hard. There is also an element of the fallacy where if there is more resources available the expectation is cost will go down, but the response ends up people just use more of the resources (there is some economics fallacy/paradox term for this that escapes me right now). Larger launch vehicles enable larger more complex spacecraft. I expect that the capability of the Falcon heavy means that the size of the Uranus spacecraft will be much larger and more complex than something like Voyager 1/2 or New Horizons.
Space missions generate far more value than they cost, also. It takes brilliant minds solving unique problems as a group and once that is done, the information and knowledge generated do not simply sit in a vault somewhere but are then appropriated by other people for terranean uses, most famously like the microwave oven, but also all of the things this this list:
https://www.philips.com/c-w/malegrooming/philips-space/space...
And undoubtedly many more.
Yup, this is a very facetious post. I'm making the point that we humans have a lot that we should stop spending on before we should stop funding science.
The money saved would probably not go to solving real problems (who gets to decide what problems are real?), but rather various politically favored boondoggles or just politicians' salaries
It's relatively small chnage compared to other budget items
space is a major driver of technological advance which can then be used on Earth
space has the potential for enormous economic growth (admittedly this is a long term thing)
-- In some languages, the sky takes its name from the concept of "cover". Even the more Germanic 'sky', which comes from the cloud barrier, is related to a form of "cover" and is related to e.g. "hide" (and 'Haut', 'scutum' etc). Otherwise, in the more Latin area, "celestial" and "color" (and forms of "cover") are related (at least in some identified paths).
-- 'Uranus' is similarly identified as coming from roots common to 'velor' ("velated" etc) - in terms of "cover", "protection" etc. 'Urn' is one related term. Again forms for further ideas of "cover" can be found from those roots, such as other IE forms for "color". From that the idea of "extension", hence other related terms such as, notably, 'Europe'.
-- Other analysis have been proposed which brought to other meanings (e.g. relations to 'rain').
-- 'Uranus' is the Greek name for the sky - and the associated divinity, father of Chronos (or Cronos - proper definition debated since antiquity), father of the Olympian deities. The term should recall this directly, and its roots, above described, as its core.
And certainly not - in a different paragraph out of sense of proportions -, an equivocal sound out of some inflection of voice found in the Philippines or Tierra-del-fuego that may remind you of a way they have to describe a rattly motorbike or anything.
We had conceived Turing tests to see when a machine starts becoming "adequate" in at least appearances, and now the public is that which cannot even make sense of very normal writing?! Everything upside down now?!
Otherwise, how can you grow higher than """AI""".
You don't understand what is written (you call it «nonsense»), why it was written, and you do not get the suspect that the fumbling one is you?
As an example:
> You think of a term, that's what you may think of, this is the realm in which you are supposed to think.
That's more of a series of phrases than a sentence, which is also a common characteristic of computer-generated text.
All this is combined with the allusive nature of your posts, which will set off "conspiracy theorist troll" or "AI-generated" alarms everywhere it goes.
That is intentionally didascalic for the intentional expression of clarity, and it is enclosed in quotes, which do denote a switch. It intentionally describes a process in blocks.
> your posts, which will set off
My dear friend, do you realize that when something is labelled through «common characteristic[s]», that would be the shallow labelling that a machine does? And it is not even Bayesian, because important amounts of texts are written in a way similar to that in which I write - machine learning itself mocks human learning after all. "Maybe" it would be important in this time and age for information accessors to realize that either they put themselves seriously into understanding expressions - or, if they have to break a guinness world record of processed text per time unit (cpr.: "Spedread War and Peace, 'ts about Napoleon in the east"), the one serious approach is to then renounce actual judgement - do it properly or act consequently, knowing that you stopped before the threshold. After all, there are machines for preprocessing - and really they cannot but guess on normalspeak because they are stupid: if you are really intelligent, it's your job to use it (and a duty - "use it or lose it").
You should see even more the absurdity.
Again - the point is very important: rushed prejudice-like labelling ("Cialis - spam") is not appropriate, it's machine-level, and a sign of decadence.
If language is a system of communication, you are not using it actively; quite the opposite in fact.
Which leads me to ask, why do you choose to express yourself this way? For the fun of it?
Do you speak this way too?
I'm really curious. Your comments almost seem AI generated.
I know (at lest presume) you wrote it that way just rhetorically, but: no, of course that's not the objective. :)
It's just that - rushed hence imperfect formulations aside, that can also happen of course - if a relatively complex idea is to be expressed, its form will follow. When I wrote «actively», it means that I craft the expressions - if you wish, that I check and vet and adjust the expression, until I find it well constructed. (And yes, this also means that implicitly I do verify whether it is understandable - but implying, "by somebody who actually intends to do their part in understanding it".) James Joyce once got furious against some editing of his work, (rightfully) stating that "he chose those expressions very intentionally" - that is an "active use of language", adopting some effort, in a conscious process.
Yes I do speak this way too. :) I have been told that to listen to me requires extra concentration - but that was by professors during oral exams...
...so actually, it's "/may/ require": it depends on the expressed idea really. I guess that certainly you would not find all of my posts "hard to read". Probably, "not all lunches are soft and buttery Big Macs" - sometimes "you have to chew" (because such is the material).
I express myself that way because I use what I believe is the proper process in composing, and that is the outcome. I "think, evaluate, consider, formulate, hone": you formulate and judge in cycle (and that is valid for the structure, the ideas, the nodes which are the terms and should be as "right" as possible...). It's how one should be supposed to think... (And in fact, it's not a formal process: it's natural.) In a way, you formulate the expression as if you sculpted. Of course I am just guessing what you find "strange", because, as you surely understand, to me it is not.
The "result" you indicate could also be a consequence of the fact that I read a relatively large amount of literature since the earliest age. In some ways to be defined, that must have an impact.
About communication, as said, it is a work shared by both parts: you express something and the part of your interlocutor is to put the right effort into understanding it or just postpone. Otherwise, the "common" part fails. Your duty is to be understandable. If the other one did not perform its own processing, the shared object would remain "communicated" (by the first) yet not "made common".
Of course, more on a practical interpretation, the problem of the /targeted/ form of expression is not trivial (in the sense that there is little to do about it): the "ideal sculpture" is for the general, untargeted communication - and it will be inadequate for some. These will require explanations, which you cannot anticipate in full, and will want to add upon being requested clarifications - the intended reader does not want to be bothered with redundant (to them) «With 'term1', what is meant...» (and you do not want to write the equivalent of a legal document per post).
About aspects of my comments reminding of AI: I do not know why some of you see them that way (apart from the inexcusable case of that which does not understand and _consequently_ decides "it must be nonsense" - remarkable paradox). Current AI is depthless (in content grasp), and I have quite strong grounds to say that here it's the opposite (meaning that the consideration is "conceptual" and reflective).
One guess (of those most relevant) is that some individuals are not used to identify complex structures outside the strict realm in their work (note that I have read posts in HN of people that say "they do their job for the money" - you will not "export" what you dislike).
By the way: just minutes ago I was awarded a «That is exceptionally well articulated, fully on your side» from a co-member at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31121890 . As you see, this way of expression is the "rule" (on this side), but while some show occasionally to be confused others do appreciate it, further to subscribing to it.