I'm really exited about Dragonfly, as Titan is a world not too different from ours: it gas lakes and rivers (made out of hydrocarbons, like methane), dunes and mountains
lucaslazarus 1 days ago [-]
All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.
14 hours ago [-]
hn_submit 1 days ago [-]
I can't imagine aliens being so stupid to claim part of our Solar System. To me this would become a giant bullseye.
Muhammad523 12 hours ago [-]
Aliens who are from the solar system have the right to claim their planet for themselves, just as we did
manquer 22 hours ago [-]
Europa could have some Europeans in it ; or extra solar aliens who can only survive in its climate so don’t care about rest of the system
King-Aaron 22 hours ago [-]
What if hypothetically they had claimed it before us.
kridsdale1 20 hours ago [-]
Then they’d better be prepared to defend it.
King-Aaron 19 hours ago [-]
I'd presume a species capable of interstellar travel would find that fairly trivial
Europa clipper launched 2 years ago arrives in 2030. DAVINCI, a Venusian probe, is slated net 2033
GolfPopper 21 hours ago [-]
BepiColombo, another joint ESA-JAXA mission, will enter orbit around Mercury next month after a longer-than-expected journey. It will be the third spacecraft to visit Mercury.
There might be others, those are just what I found in a quick search.
hparadiz 1 days ago [-]
Sample return from Venus is practically impossible with our current tech.
hn_submit 1 days ago [-]
I suggest Terraforming Venus with microbes or extremophiles.
And to hell with the "planetary protection" treaty. We need "lebensraum"! Our females want to breed!
kridsdale1 20 hours ago [-]
Venus needs men!
8 hours ago [-]
TGower 1 days ago [-]
JAXA does great work, they also publish the highest resolution open access global surface elevation model. Really impressive for a country with about 1/10th the GDP of the US.
a3w 1 days ago [-]
Bringing Protomolecule to earth, when?
(Minor spoilers for The Expanse, word Protomolecule means something there.)
I wonder how this mission compares in scale to the JAXA Hayabusa comet interceptor done twenty years ago.
numpad0 15 hours ago [-]
4 ton launch mass, so 8x mass increase against Og Hayabusa probe(510kg). About 5.4x Satrlink V2 mini sats.
The OG Hayabusa was tiny as it was on the M-V 3-stage all-solid launcher with just 1.85t to LEO of max payload. This one was on H3-24L with up to 16t to LEO(91% of an F9 ASDS) so it's bigger accordingly.
tommykins 14 hours ago [-]
My annual thing I can genuinely comment on in relation to hackernews. This is fucking so cool, I simply cannot tell you how rare it is we get primary material to do anything with.
johnea 1 days ago [-]
This is good space science.
Unlike iPhone selfies around the moon, or golf on mars.
Manned space missions are very rarely justified in the modern era.
An unmanned probe doing science for 20 years, or a one shot influenza photo op.
The cost is about the same...
fooker 17 hours ago [-]
It is important to get people excited about science, and inspire the next generation of scientists rather than choose the cheapest path to ‘good science’.
Without public support, you’ll soon find yourself without any funding. This pretty much explains NASA’s dire funding situation over the last thirty or so years.
You can only get so many people excited about weather balloons and space rock chemistry.
dyauspitr 22 hours ago [-]
> Manned space missions are very rarely justified in the modern era.
Unless you want to be interplanetary
autuni 12 hours ago [-]
I'm not an expert, but in my mind if you actually want to make the human species interplanetary, flying small groups of people to the planet won't do anything for it. Send robots to build a base first, and yes that will take a long time. Otherwise you'll just be a species that visited other planets. (which would already be cool though obviously)
manquer 22 hours ago [-]
Depends on your definition of you .
If it means life , then We don’t need humans to make life interplanetary at all; that is least efficient way to go about it ; we should instead design/choose lifeforms that are most likely to survive the target environment not depend on brittle/expensive life support technology to spread life through the system.
If the you is intelligence , then spreading AI could be a better approach rather than humans who are unlikely to be able evolve to survive in a hostile environment naturally anytime soon.
Humans in our current form in space is always going to expensive tourism no matter how much science fiction likes to pretend otherwise .
adrian_b 7 hours ago [-]
It would be very expensive, but not impossible, to make big enough spaceships in which to have suitable life conditions for humans in our current form, including gravity at the terrestrial level and radiation shielding.
Living inside huge spaceships, orbiting around some planets, where everything needed for a permanent stay should be provided, is a far more plausible way for humans to expand in the Solar System, than living on the surface of any planet or satellite of the Solar System.
The experiments with mice on the ISS have indicated that, at least for them, the gravity level at which no health problems appear is around two thirds of the Earth level, and at least one third of the Earth level is needed to avoid very serious health problems. Humans might support a somewhat lower gravity level than mice, but it is not likely that the difference is great.
Except perhaps when floating in the atmosphere of Venus, there is no place in the Solar System where the gravity is suitable for long term living. On the other hand, in a rotating spaceship the gravity level can be adjusted to whatever value is desired. One could build a rotating part also in an underground base, but unlike in a spaceship that would consume energy continuously.
johnea 3 hours ago [-]
Given that we're not living in Johnny Quest, let's get over the fictional thinking and focus on real life.
If you want to "live on mars", just bury a cargo container in the Nevada desert and move in.
You'll have the advantages of significantly reduced cosmic radiation, and the grocery store is much closer...
18 hours ago [-]
ouch-blurred52 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 22:15:35 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Venus and Europa could use some attention. Anything underway?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ice-war-on-europa-warforever
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BepiColombo
For Europa, Europa Clipper Mission (already on the way): https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/mission-time...
... and JUICE (already on the way): https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice
There might be others, those are just what I found in a quick search.
And to hell with the "planetary protection" treaty. We need "lebensraum"! Our females want to breed!
(Minor spoilers for The Expanse, word Protomolecule means something there.)
The OG Hayabusa was tiny as it was on the M-V 3-stage all-solid launcher with just 1.85t to LEO of max payload. This one was on H3-24L with up to 16t to LEO(91% of an F9 ASDS) so it's bigger accordingly.
Unlike iPhone selfies around the moon, or golf on mars.
Manned space missions are very rarely justified in the modern era.
An unmanned probe doing science for 20 years, or a one shot influenza photo op.
The cost is about the same...
Without public support, you’ll soon find yourself without any funding. This pretty much explains NASA’s dire funding situation over the last thirty or so years.
You can only get so many people excited about weather balloons and space rock chemistry.
Unless you want to be interplanetary
If it means life , then We don’t need humans to make life interplanetary at all; that is least efficient way to go about it ; we should instead design/choose lifeforms that are most likely to survive the target environment not depend on brittle/expensive life support technology to spread life through the system.
If the you is intelligence , then spreading AI could be a better approach rather than humans who are unlikely to be able evolve to survive in a hostile environment naturally anytime soon.
Humans in our current form in space is always going to expensive tourism no matter how much science fiction likes to pretend otherwise .
Living inside huge spaceships, orbiting around some planets, where everything needed for a permanent stay should be provided, is a far more plausible way for humans to expand in the Solar System, than living on the surface of any planet or satellite of the Solar System.
The experiments with mice on the ISS have indicated that, at least for them, the gravity level at which no health problems appear is around two thirds of the Earth level, and at least one third of the Earth level is needed to avoid very serious health problems. Humans might support a somewhat lower gravity level than mice, but it is not likely that the difference is great.
Except perhaps when floating in the atmosphere of Venus, there is no place in the Solar System where the gravity is suitable for long term living. On the other hand, in a rotating spaceship the gravity level can be adjusted to whatever value is desired. One could build a rotating part also in an underground base, but unlike in a spaceship that would consume energy continuously.
If you want to "live on mars", just bury a cargo container in the Nevada desert and move in.
You'll have the advantages of significantly reduced cosmic radiation, and the grocery store is much closer...