2004 Huygens probe to Saturn's Titan: Still our only outer solar system lander | Hacker News Reader

2004 Huygens probe to Saturn's Titan: Still our only outer solar system lander

spacedaily.com

19 pointsGaishan9 comments

>No spacecraft has ever landed in the outer solar system — except one: the Huygens probe,

Editors are asleep at spacedaily.com or have been replaced by a shitty AI. Rosetta landed on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in the outer solar system in 2015.

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Rosett...

Ah, what a perfect opportunity to link one of my favorite old Youtube videos, which is an animation of a significant amount of telemetry captured by Huygens as it landed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZC4u0clEc0

I always loved the presentation of the information.

I remember listening to the landing on NPR(?) when it happened. There was no streaming back then and IDK what channel it would have been on if it was on TV at all. IIRC they brought someone special into the studio because they expected to need someone who was extra good at verbalizing visual things. It was very impressive at the time.

It's partly because these missions take so long to pay off. The Jovian and Saturnian moons are definitely targets for landers, as is some of the asteroid belt. There is a significant signal delay as well, meaning nothing would be done in real time.

Martian rovers can have a twenty minute signal delay one way. Meaning a return signal takes over forty minutes. If it isn't behind the Sun. By the time probes get to Jupiter, the delay on a return signal can be the best part of two hours. That can increase even more going to and from Saturn.

Increase that by even more for Uranus and Neptune.

With new, lower-cost heavy lift capabilities coming online soon such as SpaceX Starhip it would make sense to explore the outer solar system with a mass manufactured probes.

So instead of designing totally bespoke multi-billion-dollar probes, build dozens of hundred-million dollar probes that leverage efficiencies of scale just like any other industrial product.

Send them to every outer planet, every moon, and every large asteroid like Ceres!

The problem is that landers will study very different conditions. Some would land on rocks, others would land on ice, others could land in volcanic areas. Some would be looking to be rovers, while others would be trying to drill down to an ocean under deep ice.

Most would be landing on rock-like cold surfaces in hard vacuum. The exceptions are rare.

Similarly, you obviously couldn't use exact replicas of the same design for the space probes, you'd need variants to deal with the greater distance from the Sun.

You would need close/medium/far probe designs with small/medium/large solar panels, radio antennas, and camera optics to compensate for the lower light levels.

For each design variant you could make 10-20 exact clones, and the variants would be very similar to each other.

We do this now!

Just not for science.

Spy satellites tend to be serially produced, as are GPS satellites, and of course Starlink satellites, which are made in their thousands.

Landing on Io would be completely different from Titan. Because of the violent nature of Io, a cheaper probe may actually be a benefit, because like Venus, we would have to study the local conditions before sending more complex landers.

Of course another trick would be to put orbiters around Jupiter, Saturn etc which could be used to relay signals.

> Landing on Io would be completely different from Titan.

Sure, but landing is not necessary for doing much more science than we are right now!

An orbiter dedicated to Io would dramatically increase our knowledge of this unique and special moon.

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