> On March 1, 2025, Europa Clipper will reach Marsâ orbit and begin to loop around the Red Planet, using the planetâs gravity to gain speed. [...]
> At Mars, scientists plan to turn on the spacecraftâs 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)
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.
> 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.
ESA & JAXA are less biased toward manned exploration, and I'm no expert but I'd expect them to have less funding than NASA but the funding is more stable and easier to apply to projects (less US-style pork barrel funding), so they get to do long-term planning more.
NASA needs PR more.
They did land a probe on Venus however!
Probably learned more science from Voyager than all the manned moon missions. The first thing that astronauts on Mars will do is deploy a drone.
So cool! I worked on this project during my internship at JPL. Iâm sure they hucked all my code in the trash as soon as I left, but it was a fun summer. :)
Quick question: Does JPL use PowerPoint a lot ?
All of NASA uses PowerPoint a lot.
The extension mechanism for the magnetometer looks amazing. Godspeed little probe.
Holy cow, that 23 second video is 118 megabytes
Modern technology truly is amazing.
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.
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Will starship make any difference in the speed of these probes or will it just allow much heavier probes to be launched?
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...
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.
Comms is the reason. DSN dish time is not a particularly abundant resource even today.
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.
Everything you said is right, but on-orbit refueling is of course theoretically possible, and isnât THAT huge of a leap given what SpaceX has already accomplished. Letâs 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, itâs hard, but that is perhaps the best engineering team in the history of humankind, and I think theyâre 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 moneyâs on they get it working. Maybe it takes five years or a dozen failures, but Iâm confident that they will succeed eventually and there will be orbiting methane and lox fuel stations sooner rather than later.
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.
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
- "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.
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 .
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.
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.
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?
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 Clipperâs 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 itâs a waste of money to continuously support the careers of what are possibly the spaceship equivalents of wheelwrights, stable masters, and saddlers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More mass means more fuel means more speed?
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.
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"?
> 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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